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The future of coal played a starring role in the 2016 presidential election. As an industry, an energy supply, and a source of jobs and identity in many communities, coal was both a practical and symbolic issue, one that helped solidify Donald Trump’s support among white working class voters not just in coal country itself but around the nation. It stood in for a deep divide between the parties, one that cast Trump as the champion of what he called “the forgotten men and women of our country,” while Hillary Clinton and her party were supposedly cruel elitists ready to condemn those Americans to a future of deprivation in pursuit of a radical and ruinous environmental agenda.
Eight years later, the future of coal — or more specifically, the shape and speed of its demise — is being decided through administration policy and the workings of the market. But on the campaign trail, no one is talking about it. Coal has almost disappeared as a political issue.
To understand why, we have to begin in that 2016 campaign. In May of that year, Hillary Clinton came to Williamson, West Virginia to make amends. Less than two months before, she had said in a CNN town hall that “we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” generating enormous backlash despite the fact that she was touting her plan to “bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.” Now, at a forum held just a couple of blocks from the famous Williamson Coal House (a building made entirely from coal), a former coal company employee asked her, “How you can say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you are going to be our friends?”
Clinton insisted her remarks had been taken out of context. “I’m here because I want you to know whether people vote for me or not whether they yell at me or not, it’s not going to affect what I can do to help because I feel like that’s a moral obligation,” she said.
Trump was far less nuanced in his approach to what he called “beautiful clean coal.” His message was simple: Elect me, and all the lost coal jobs will return. “For those miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off,” he said at a rally in West Virginia. “I love the miners, and we're going to put the miners back to work,” he said at another.
It worked: Trump’s biggest margins of victory came in the two states with the highest coal production, Wyoming and West Virginia.
And he certainly tried to save the coal industry. He withdrew from the Paris climate accords, rolled back environmental regulations on coal, installed coal industry executives and lobbyists in key administration positions, encouraged coal mining on federal lands, undid the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, and tried to bail out failing coal plants.
But none of that brought back the coal jobs. Total coal mining employment in the U.S. stayed at the same level for the first four years of his presidency — around 53,000 — then fell by 20% in his final year, during the Covid pandemic. Today that figure is around 43,000, a miniscule number given the size of our economy; more Americans work at the Cheesecake Factory than in the entire coal mining industry. That may be the first reason Trump isn’t talking about coal on the campaign trail: He didn’t keep his most high-profile promise.
Yet in coal country, Trump was not punished for his failure to bring back the coal jobs. Williamson, where Hillary Clinton made her 2016 mea culpa, provides a perfect example. With a population of 3,000, it’s the largest city in Mingo County, whose population has shrunk in every Census since the one in 1990. It’s a place with deep economic and health-care challenges, where coal is woven throughout the local identity and sense of place (the high school’s sports teams are called the Miners and Lady Miners).
According to the most recent report from the state of West Virginia, in 2022 there were only 409 people working in coal in Mingo County, or about 3% of the working-age population. In 2016, Trump got 83% of the vote there. In 2020, despite not bringing back the jobs, he got 85%. Voters there didn’t seem to care that Trump didn’t revive the industry. Or maybe it was never really about anything so concrete and practical.
Which brings us to the second reason coal may be fading as a campaign issue: What it represents to the country as a whole has changed.
More and more, coal seems like yesterday’s news; total production has declined by nearly 50% since 2008. While environmental regulations have had an impact, the biggest reason is competition, first from natural gas and then from renewables, which are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation. While every last voter may not be aware of that fact, years of headlines to that effect — and the steadily increasing number of jobs in the renewables industry — may be penetrating into public consciousness.
Consider Trump’s promise to be “a dictator on day one” so he can do two things: round up immigrants, and “drill, drill, drill.” The latter idea is absurdly unnecessary even for the most fervent fossil fuel advocate, given that the U.S. produced more oil in 2023 than any country in history ever did. Nevertheless, Trump clearly believes it represents something compelling to voters, or at least his voters. But he’s not promising to be a dictator so he can “mine, mine, mine.”
For his part, President Biden touts his administration’s efforts to invest in struggling areas that used to rely on coal, but often in remarks and fact sheets that few voters see. His administration is addressing new concerns over black lung disease (which Trump’s refused to do). Biden spends a great deal of time talking about the government’s green investments, but doesn’t seem to be defensive about the effects the energy transition is having on coal, as so many Democrats have been in the past. Neither he nor others in his party are all that worried about repeating Hillary Clinton’s experience.
That’s despite the fact that the administration’s policies are going a long way toward bringing about the end of coal, or at least its transition to a minor supporting player in the nation’s energy mix. In the latest move toward his goal of a zero-carbon energy system, the EPA announced a new set of regulations affecting coal plants, including the most significant: Plants that plan to stay open past 2039 will have to cut or capture 90 percent of their emissions by 2032. The almost inevitable result will be an acceleration in the closing of coal plants.
When that plan was announced, there were predictable objections from industry and coal-friendly officials — outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin called the new EPA rule “death by a thousand cuts to America’s fossil fuel industry, especially coal” — but on the whole, the reaction was remarkably restrained. Trump did not send a dozen all-caps Truth Social posts denouncing the regulations. Republicans didn’t hold press conferences and suspend all other congressional business to make angry speeches about them. It almost had an air of resignation.
Yes, there will be lawsuits, and there’s a fair chance the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court will strike down the regulations. But as a political issue, it didn’t generate much heat.
That tells us that something important has changed. Coal is no longer a totem of identity and a cause for Republicans to get their own supporters to the polls and win over converts in the middle. National Democrats are overcoming the fear that a pro-coal backlash will turn their climate policies and advocacy into campaign headaches. Just as coal’s importance to the nation’s energy supply is inexorably diminishing, its political power is fading as well. Which makes further climate progress all the more likely.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.