With President Donald Trump about to return to the White House, there will soon be a chance to correct many of President Joe Biden’s mistakes. Of course, that would include border security, correcting a justice system that has gone wild with lawfare against conservatives, and hopefully helping end the war in Ukraine.

However, it would also include the many things Biden did wrong regarding energy and the environment, notably how his administration continued President Obama’s war on coal, America’s most reliable energy source, in favor of costly and unreliable wind and solar power.

While natural gas has become less expensive in recent years due to the hydraulic fracturing revolution, it still does not make sense to replace coal with gas in many base-load power instances either. Natural gas is a special fuel that should usually be saved for applications it does especially well, such as heating, cooking, transportation, fertilizers, and in the manufacture of fabrics, glass, steel, plastics, paint, and other products. Using it for base load power generation is a waste when the US has so much high-quality coal there for the taking. Using gas for base-load power generation in place of coal is, in many cases, a reverse Midas touch, equivalent to turning gold into lead.

We also need to recognize that coal prices are far less volatile than those of natural gas. In particular, the cost of coal for electricity has remained almost flat over the past 15 years.

The US is literally the Saudi Arabia of coal, with about 256 billion tons of coal, which is approximately 23.2% of the world’s total coal reserves, making it the world leader. One source estimates that America’s proven reserves total about 348 times its annual consumption. In other words, the US has about 348 years of coal left at current consumption levels, excluding unproven reserves. The US Energy Information Administration gives an even higher estimate, stating:

“Based on U.S. coal production in 2022, of about 0.594 billion short tons, the recoverable coal reserves would last about 422 years, and recoverable reserves at producing mines would last about 20 years.”

Clearly, we need more producing coal mines, not less.

In contrast, the US ranks 4^th in the world in natural gas reserves, significantly trailing Russia, Iran and Qatar:

When it is not crippled by over-regulation, coal, not natural gas, is usually the least expensive option. If you tied his legs together and his hands behind his back, basketball star Lebron James would lose in a one-on-one against even me. Similarly, coal was not allowed to compete in a fair and open marketplace with other energy sources under the Obama administration, so naturally, it often lost out.

Concerning the Obama approach, the late Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, then one of the largest American coal producers, said the “regulatory rampage” of the Obama administration drove down coal use and “the destruction of the last eight years under Obama and the Democrats has permanently and severely destroyed reliable and affordable electricity in the U.S.” (Columbus Dispatch, March 26, 2017).

While Trump made efforts to revitalize coal during his first term, overzealous regulation during Biden’s term continued to restrict coal use in America, again making it even harder for coal to compete. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has introduced rules that require coal plants to either significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through, for example, capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground (i.e., “carbon capture and sequestration” or CCS) or shut down entirely over the coming years. In essence, the EPA is treating carbon dioxide emissions as pollution and using its “power plant rule” to force the closure of America’s coal generation fleet.

However, CCS is a technically challenging and expensive process. Murray explained in 2017:

“It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.

“Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal.’”

Biden warned us before he took office that he, too, had no sympathy for coal miners or coal-fired power plant operators losing their jobs in his irrational obsession with “electrification of everything” in attempting to stop climate change. On the campaign trail in 2020, he said in New Hampshire at a campaign:

“Anybody who can go down 300-3,000 feet in a mine sure as hell can learn how to program [a computer] as well… Anybody who can throw coal into furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake.”

No Joe, the skills needed to mine and handle coal are not easily transferred to a career in computer programming.

Even after being elected president, Biden was still spouting nonsense about energy, asserting in 2022:

“we’re going to be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar power.”

At the UN Climate Change Conference in 2023, John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, made even stronger statements against coal. He said that coal-fired power plants must no longer be permitted anywhere in the world and asserted that the US is committed to phasing out coal power plants. Kerry explained that America has joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which intends to stop building new coal plants and phase out existing ones.

But with the developing world using more and more coal to power the industries that we are losing to them, what America does will have little impact on world carbon dioxide emissions and essentially nothing on climate. After all, China alone accounted for 54% (4.52 billion tonnes) of the world’s total coal consumption in 2022 and was then projected to increase consumption by an additional 150 million tonnes by 2026.

To properly defend coal, we need to understand its history, where it came from, how it changed the world, and why it is so much more dependable than most other power sources. Stay tuned for those topics in the next articles in this series!