What did Donald Trump do today?

He forced the military to give long-term contracts to the coal industry.

American utility companies have been using less and less coal to generate electricity every year for decades now. The reason is simple economics: coal is more expensive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis than either renewable fuels like solar and wind or its main fossil fuel competitor, natural gas. 

 

Coal is a uniquely dirty fuel, even setting aside the fact that burning it contributes to climate change. It's also a major environmental source of cancer: burning it in the massive quantities needed to generate electricity puts tons of naturally occurring radioactive elements that would normally be safely underground right into the air. Even when the chemical fallout from coal isn't toxic in and of itself, like sulfur dioxide or fine particulates that clog lung passages, the downwind radioactive plume is a cancer-causing agent.

It also destroys the natural environment in the areas its mined. Toxic chemical agents used in the mining process can permanently foul water tables, and the acidic runoff kills wetland ecosystems. Even when coal companies have complied with government mandates to fix some of the environmental damage they've caused, the health problems for people living in coal-mining communites persist, and range from "traditional" mining diseases like emphysema and black lung to long-term genetic damage.

The nation's heaviest coal-mining areas are also its poorest, which is not a coincidence. The coal industry has a centuries-long reputation for ruthlessness when it comes to its own labor force. Even when prevailing wages for miners are enough to support a family on—and they have not been for quite a while—the work is incredibly dangerous, and grisly and preventable accidents due to mine owner neglect are still common. One example is the 2006 Sago Mine disaster, which killed 12 miners after an explosion in a mine that was operating with more than 200 active safety violations. Trump appointed the owner of that mine, billionaire Wilbur Ross, as his secretary of commerce during his first term.

The result of all this is that coal is a dying industry—and one that Americans from coal country, who know it best, are happy to see die. Virtually every other form of energy that exists is cheaper, cleaner, safer, more reliable, more profitable, easier to scale up, and requires less and cheaper infrastructure. And because coal's main use is in electricity generation, it's also the most easily replaced fuel: electrical grids don't care where the electricity comes from.  

Today, Trump held an event in the White House for coal industry executives—all of whom financially supported his political—where he signed an executive order requiring the United States military to buy coal-generated electricity far into the future. It's hard to think of an organization that needs coal or coal-derived electricity less than the modern military, but it is the largest budget that Trump has control over, and so the easiest to force into the coal subsidy business.

In other words, Trump has ordered a massive, locked-in subsidy of an industry that is failing the test of the free market, and one that benefits his political cronies. This isn't the first time that Trump has dabbled in that particularly corrupt form of socialist central planning, as actual conservatives have noticed. 

Trump, who is nearly 80, appears to genuinely believe some truly ridiculous things about the superior alternatives like wind power (which he thinks causes cancer somehow) and solar (which he falsely believes can't be stored in batteries after the sun sets) that have been developed since he was a boy. But he also seems to think that coal is a much bigger and more economically important industry than it is. There are only about 45,000 coal miners working in the United States at present, or just under one in every 8,000 Americans. (That's fewer than the number of florists, and about the same number of people as work in the specific job of packaging seafood.)

Why does this matter?

• Countries that are serious about having energy stability in the future—even other dictatorships, like China—are investing in anything but coal. 

• Republicans who voted for Trump because they thought he shared their belief in the free market might not like him doing the Putin-style version of socialist welfare supports for oligarchs. 

• Presidents who can't or can't be bothered to update their understanding of energy from the 1940s aren't mentally competent to serve in the 2020s.