Being wrong about the fundamentals of the energy market is one thing, but raising unrealistic hopes with desperate people, is something else. But this is what Trump is doing when he promises to bring back coal jobs to coal regions.
US President Donald Trump has claimed that environmental and climate policy were to blame for the decline of U.S. coal – or in his words: “Regulations that shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and block the construction of new ones — how stupid is that?”. After 1.5 years in office he analyzed, in summer 2018, that “the coal industry is back”.
At the core, Trump is very wrong with two things, though a little less with the one and so much more with the other: The attribution of the decline in coal jobs to U.S. environmental and climate regulation neglects fundamental changes in the U.S. energy landscape and generation fleet. But an even more daring statement is the claim to bring back coal jobs to Appalachian coal regions.
There is a broad
consensus that the drop in U.S. natural gas prices is the main driver behind
this…
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The Most Revolutionary Act 