Shitstain's Coal Promises Meaningless; More Coal Plant Closures 2018 YTD Than Any Year 2009-11

[hatrack]

Edited to correct title.

President Trump campaigned on a pledge to end the supposed “war on coal” that he claimed President Obama had been waging. But the reality is that more coal capacity was retired in the first 45 days of 2018 than in each of the first three years of the Obama administration.

In fact, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported last week in its 2018 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook that by the end of last year, coal plant owners “had announced 12.5GW of planned retirements for 2018, foreshadowing the largest year for coal decommissioning since the 15GW of retirements in 2015.”

Mary Anne Hitt, Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, explained this week that “a coal plant has retired every 16 days since Trump was elected.” That’s the same pace as during the Obama administration’s full eight years, but much faster than the pace during Obama’s first term.

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So do those numbers mean Trump is also waging a war on coal? The truth is there never was a “war on coal.” There’s been two big battles, though. The first is an economic battle in the marketplace, where low cost renewables, natural gas, and energy efficiency became so cheap that costly and inflexible coal (and nuclear) plants simply could not compete.

EDIT

https://thinkprogress.org/coal-plants-now-shutting-down-faster-under-trump-than-obama-4da9d4554ec0/

[Yonnie3]

1. "The economy stupid", James Carville

Coal has little demand in modern society, stupid. Clean coal or even dirty coal costs too much to be useful, stupid. 'Rump embraces stupid, stupid.

[joshcryer]

2. Hillary Clinton warned them their jobs were going away.

As usual they didn't listen.