President Trump continued to clarify this week his environmental priorities promising to open hundreds of coal power plants in the United States in an effort to advance competition against China.
“After years of being held captive by environmental, lunatic, radical and thugs, allowing other countries, in particular China, to obtain a great economic advantage over us when opening hundreds of all the power plants of coal fire, I am authorizing my administration to immediately start producing energy with beautiful and clean coal,” Trump wrote in a position on Monday of the social network.
Although the publication was not linked to any particular policy plan or document, it reaches the White House points to several environmental agencies and clean energy initiatives. Only in the last week, the Administration has announced plans to significantly reverse the regulations that govern the production of coal and potentially collect up to 65% of scientists and researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency, among other actions.
Coal represents approximately 16% of the country's electricity generation, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, below 50% in 2000 as natural gas and nuclear and renewable energy have grown. Although relatively economical to produce, coal is considered the dirtiest fossil fuel and comes with considerable environmental costs, including the release of air pollution in particles and almost double the amount of carbon dioxide that calmed the planet as natural gas.
Among the articles related to coal for the reconsideration of the EPA are its toxic standards of mercury and air, regulations that limit the emissions of the largest plants in the country that burn coal and oil to heat water, which produces steam and, in turn, generates electricity.
The standards have “achieved important health and environment benefits by reducing a wide range of dangerous air pollutants,” according to the EPA website. But the agency now says that the standards “are directed incorrectly to coal power plants” and should be checked.
“The EPA needs to pursue the regulation of common sense to boost the great American return, not to continue on the path of destruction and destruction of the last administration,” said the main administrator of the agency, Lee Zeldin, in a statement last week. “In the EPA, we are committed to protecting human health and the environment; we oppose closing clean, affordable and reliable energy for US families.”
Zeldin said that the standards established by the Biden Administration would cost the EPA more than $ 790 million between 2028 and 2038. As their EPA challenges these standards, Zeldin said, his agency is considering an exemption of two -year compliance for the affected energy plants, as it happens through the rules processing process.
The main environmental agency of the Nation also announced a review of the regulations that govern the elimination of coal ashes, the byproduct of the burning of coal in the power plants. The EPA expects to prioritize a carbon ashes program that accelerates permissions and placing coal ashes regulations more completely in state hands, said Zeldin. The agency will similarly review the rules extended by federal coal ashes regulations to unregulated areas where coal ashes are managed, such as inactive power plants.
Zeldin said that imminent changes of the agency will reinforce the position of the United States as an energy leader and help save money for millions of Americans. “President Trump has fulfilled his promise to unleash energy domain and reduce the cost of living,” he said. “In the EPA we will make our part to boost the great American return.”
These proposed changes, together with the president's social networks publication, underline a considerable change of clean energy initiatives of the Biden Administration, including its impulse due to green infrastructure and electric vehicles.
The United States had been on the way to closing half of its coal generation capacity by 2026, according to a report by the Institute of Energy Economy and Financial Analysis.
But Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, told Bloomberg News last week that the administration is now looking for ways to revive coal plants that have closed and prevent others from being closed. Burgum and other officials have said that keeping plants online can help reduce energy costs for US consumers, among other benefits.
Burgum also told Bloomberg that the administration wants to undo the “biden administration attack against American energy” through bureaucracy and training the nation to compete in an armed career against China. IA data centers require immense amounts of energy, which may come from coal or other sources.
The publication of Trump's social networks suggests that the renewed approach to coal is part of a power game against China, which is largely based on the power of cheap coal for its manufacturing sector and economic expansion. About 60% of China's power comes from coal, which has resulted in some of the worst levels of air pollution and particles in the world.
That said, although China continues to depend largely on coal, it has also begun to invest in solar and wind energy. It seems that the United States can be in the opposite direction.
Last year, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, traveled to China to help promote global cooperation on climate change and model California policies on clean energy and pollution reduction. In the last week, the Trump administration has suggested that a key principle in the scientific understanding of fossil fuels, that greenhouse gases, a primary by -product of burned coal, are harmful to human health and the environment, could be reconsidered.
