Obama "bankrupting" coal companies

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The futile fight to save coal:

At the Department of Energy, Rick Perry tried and failed to engineer a ham-handed intervention into energy markets to boost coal and nuclear. At the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke is shrinking national monuments to allow coal mines to be built closer to them. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt is repealing the Clean Power Plan (Obama’s carbon regulations on power plants) and seeking the weakest possible replacement. The list goes on. (On this theme, read Mike Grunwald’s great story in Politico Magazine about Trump’s love affair with coal.)

The irony is that this goal — the one goal around which this otherwise feckless administration is actually able to organize — is deeply and irrevocably futile. If you can look past all the venality and mendacity involved, it’s almost poignant. 

There are still hundreds of plants in operation in the US, producing roughly a third of US power, but one in four of those plants is slated to retire or shift to natural gas, and another 17 percent beyond that are uneconomic, running only by virtue of being shielded from competition. As Department of Energy data shows, after a brief bump last year, US coal has resumed its inexorable decline..

4 signs that Trump’s furious efforts to save coal are futile - Vox

Read the rest of the article to see how coal is declining in most of the rest of the world and renewables are increasingly outcompeting it. In 2017 exactly 500 coal jobs were added in the US..

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A former photographer for the Department of Energy said he was illegally fired for leaking photographs of Energy Secretary Rick Perry meeting with a coal mogul. Simon Edelman filed a whistleblower complaint earlier this month with the Energy Department’s Office of Inspector General, saying leaking the photos was protected by the First Amendment. “In retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights, Mr. Edelman was placed on administrative leave, had thousands of dollars of personal possessions unlawfully seized … and was unlawfully terminated from his job effective December 27, 2017,” John Tye, an attorney for Whistleblower Aid who is representing Edelman, wrote in the complaint.

Former Energy employee says he was fired for leaking photos of Perry with coal mogul | TheHill

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In a room packed with coal industry leaders in Charleston, West Virginia, a speaker held up a fake “pink slip” for a local newspaper reporter who covers the business, and mockingly said he wished the journalist could be in attendance.
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The crowd erupted into laughter because the reporter, Ken Ward, who has covered the industry with an unforgiving eye for years, was not there. The pink slip is a nod to the fact that his publication, the Charleston Gazette, [url=https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/gazette-mail-declaring-bankruptcy-wheeling-newspapers-is-planned-buyer/article_5a0e1ede-29aa-5866-ab47-7b9655a0d3bb.html]recently filed for bankruptcy. The stunt was first reported by Taylor Kuykendall, a fellow coal reporter for the S&P Global Market Intelligence, the news and financial data website.

The speaker, Robert McLusky, is lead attorney for Massey Energy, which owned the Upper Big Branch mine when it exploded in 2010, killing 29 workers. Ward, a 25-year reporting veteran led the Gazette’s aggressive and detailed coverage of the disaster, peppering the company with questions about the regulatory corner-cutting that led to the fatal explosion.

Coal chiefs mock reporter as critical West Virginia media voice goes bust | US news | The Guardian

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Certainly, he has reason to be happy about the numbers. Coal mining jobs have risen in the past year, an anomaly after years of decline. And it’s not the first time Trump has celebrated the apparent return of coal. Early in his presidency, he exaggerated that the country had “picked up 45,000 mining jobs in a very short period of time,” adding that he planned to do away with onerous regulation surrounding the industry. But Trump is celebrating far too soon. In reality, the industry added a much lesser 8,000 jobs in 2017, up about 1.6% from a year earlier, based on preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics figures in December.

The industry has 50,500 positions in total. And the bounce in coal has little to do with the Trump administration itself—but rather market factors unlikely to have a repeat performance this year. “We take stock of coal market developments in 2017 and find that while U.S. production did recover slightly, it had nothing to do with a change in federal policy,” Rhodium Group analysts wrote in a recent note. James Stevenson, an analyst at IHS Markit, says the boost is largely due to 2017’s unseasonably cold weather and rising demand for coal from other nations. Cold weather drove up the price of natural gas—making coal look like a more attractive fuel option. Meanwhile, a synchronized economic recovery in 2017 led several countries to ramp up building projects—contributing to an increase in coal demand. The U.S.’ exports helped boost coal production in 2017 by 6% to 773 million short tons—though demand in the U.S. declined, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

If the industry is to add a significant number of jobs, say the 45,000 that Trump appears to think it has added, coal mines would have to continue opening. But it will be hard for companies to make that commitment. Mines are built to last about 20 years—a very long-term commitment considering a president’s term lasts four years, Daniels said.

Coal Mining Jobs up in Trump's First Year, But It Won't Last | Fortune

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The 40 percent decline in U.S. coal-fired power generation over the last decade accounted for 75 percent of the total reduction of 800 million metric tons in U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 2005 and 2017.[1] The shift away from coal was mainly driven by lower natural gas prices due to the shale revolution and stagnant U.S. electricity demand, and to a lesser extent by policy-supported growth in wind and solar generation. With power generation accounting for over 90 percent of U.S. coal use, there was a comparable reduction in U.S. coal production over the last decade.

The U.S. coal sector

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The Trump administration’s own data reveal coal isn’t coming back. Coal consumption in the United States is being blown away by wind, according to new analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). And Trump’s trade war may be starting to worsen coal’s downward spiral.

The EIA projected on Tuesday that coal production will hit a four-decade low in 2019 and drop again in 2020. At the same time, renewable energy generation will soar over the next two years, led by wind power. In fact, the EIA projects that “annual generation from wind will surpass hydropower generation for the first time in 2019.” In 2020, wind will expand its role as the leading source of U.S. renewable power... 

Despite telling West Virginians last August, “The coal industry is back,” President Donald Trump has presided over a faster rate of coal plant retirements in his first two years than President Barack Obama saw in his entire first term.

Trump can’t stop coal’s death spiral, and his trade war may speed it up – ThinkProgress