Trump uses wartime powers to dole out $700m to ‘clean, beautiful’ coal

Workers transport and organize mounds of coal on a hilltop near an Arch Coal facility in Beckley, West Virginia, in 2025. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters View image in fullscreen Workers transport and organize mounds of coal on a hilltop near an Arch Coal facility in Beckley, West Virginia, in 2025. Trump and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for their war on the environment | Alexander Hurst Trump is using the Defense Production Act, a cold war-era statute used to accelerate American industrial output in times of national need, to provide grants to more than a dozen existing coal plants across the US, including facilities capable of exporting coal. “As a result of the $700m investment that I’m announcing today, we will protect 14 coal plants and 42 coalmines, a tremendous number, and build two new coal plants and one massive new export terminal,” Trump said. The funds will be used to bring a new coal export terminal online in Oakland, California, and to restart an existing facility in Maryland. They will also keep online plants across 10 states: West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Each of those 10 states voted for Trump, the president boasted on Thursday. “We won them all,” he said. The two new coal plants will be in Alaska and West Virginia. Trump has long been a champion of reviving the US’s ailing coal industry. Thursday’s White House event featured supportive governors and lawmakers from coal-rich states such as Wyoming and West Virginia. In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water. The administration’s attempts to provide a cuddly rebranding to coal have even extended to creating a new mascot with giant eyes, called Coalie, and gushing social media posts that include an image of a lump of coal wearing sunglasses as if it were on the TV show Love Island. “You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded ‘clean, beautiful’,” Trump said on Thursday. “Complicates our life, but it’s good.” Regardless of such terminology, coal is not clean. It is the most carbon-dense fossil fuel and therefore a leading cause of the climate crisis when burned.