Attempts to bring back a dying industry could increase your energy bill
The Real Reason the Feds
Want to Revive the Coal Industry
Ian Rose / Sierra Magazine
(October 15, 2025) — The Trump administration called it “Coal Day 2.0.” Leading environmentalists said it’s an attempt to prop up failing coal companies at the cost of the environment and public health.
On September 29, the administration announced a series of coordinated regulatory and funding changes to support the coal industry from three different federal agencies. The announcements include opening 13.1 million acres of public land for coal leases, reconsidering or delaying regulations on air and water pollution from power plants, and $625 million in new investments in coal.
“The Trump administration is making an unprecedented effort to prop up the coal industry, even though the majority of Americans understand that coal is polluting and expensive,” said Laurie Williams, the director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
Both US coal mining and burning have fallen sharply in recent decades. Coal production fell by 40 percent between 2013 and 2023. Coal burning for electricity reached its peak in 2008, when coal-fired power plants burned over 1 billion tons of coal. By 2023, that number had dropped by over 60 percent, replaced by cheaper gas and renewables like solar and wind.
Trump and his appointees blame the decline in coal production on increased regulations by the last two Democratic presidents. In April, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin said, “The Obama and Biden administrations deliberately tried to regulate coal out of existence.”
But the decline of American coal was well underway before President Obama took office, and many experts agree that the biggest force behind the shift away from coal was economic, rather than regulatory. A report last year by the nonpartisan climate policy think tank Energy Innovation found that the cost of generating power with coal rose by 28 percent between 2021 and 2024. Meanwhile, the cost of renewable energy is falling fast. The per-kilowatt-hour cost of new solar power has fallen by half since 2014, and wind is falling even faster.
The move away from coal has already had both public health and economic benefits for the country. Last year, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found $300 billion in air quality and health benefits, compared with under $8 billion in wages lost in coal country.
That’s because, despite claims of “clean coal” made by the industry and administration officials, coal is the dirtiest and most polluting fuel on the planet. Every terawatt-hour of electricity from coal emits about 950,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the primary driver of climate change. Even fracked gas emits only about 57 percent as much CO2.
Both the mining and burning of coal also create huge quantities of other pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, heavy metals, and fly ash. A 2023 study in the journal Science found that coal particulates are more than twice as deadly as the same-size particulates from other sources and traced over 450,000 deaths to coal pollution since 1999.
“There’s no doubt that there will be public health consequences to these actions,” said Williams of the September announcements. “It’s not going to be good for the planet, and it’s not going to be good for public health.”
The administration’s actions are set to impact one state more than any other: Wyoming. More than 40 percent of US coal comes from the Cowboy State, almost three times as much as second-place West Virginia. Most of that comes from the Powder River Basin, one of the richest coal deposits in the world.
Northeastern Wyoming may be mostly dry and mountainous today, but 50 million years ago, it was covered in a thousand square miles of swampland. Peat moss from these swamps gradually sank and collected over millennia, forming seams of coal 100 or more feet thick.
Just before the Coal Day 2.0 announcements, the Bureau of Land Management openeda 3,500-acre tract of Wyoming’s Campbell and Converse Counties to coal leasing, next to the currently operating Antelope Mine. It would have been the first new lease in this part of Wyoming in 10 years. The BLM estimates that the new lease contains about 365 million tons of recoverable coal.
The auction for this lease was set for October 8. But after a lowball bid for another new lease in Montana, the BLM indefinitely postponedthe auction. The lone bidder on that lease proposed a price that worked out to less than a penny per ton. Leases in the area usually go for over 100 times that. It’s another sign that the energy market has moved on from investing real money in coal, even if the administration hasn’t.
Other leases are set to open soon in North Dakota, Utah, and Alabama.
The winner of those auctions, if they go forward, will be getting coal from federal public lands for cheaper than ever. Included in the Department of the Interior’s public land opening announcement in September was a new, lower royalty rate. Mining royalties are the fees that companies pay to mine on public land, and they were previously set at between 8 and 12.5 percent. The new policy lowers that rate to a flat 7 percent.
Administration officials justify this support for coal by claiming that it will create new, high-paying jobs in coal communities that badly need them. But coal mining isn’t the job creator it used to be. Like many other industries, coal is now largely automated. As of this August, Wyoming’s entire coal industry, producer of over 200 million tons a year, employed only 3,400 coal workers.
The real push for coal may be coming from a different sector entirely, another industry with close ties to the Trump administration. Technology companies are investing heavily in AI, leading to a boom in data centers nationwide. In 2018, data centers took up about 2 percent of the nation’s electrical power. By 2023, that share had already more than doubled, with these facilities eating up 176 terawatt-hours of power, more than the total power used by the state of Illinois.
By 2028, data centers are projected to use between 6 and 12 percent of the entire US electrical grid. This rapid spike in power use is raising electric bills for users all over the country, and along with administration policies slowing or shutting down new renewable power projects, will require a ramp up in coal and other fossil fuels.
Environmentalists across the country have been united in their criticism of the new coal push. Numerous groups released press releases condemning the move to force American rate-payers to keep coal on life support.
Matthew Davis of the League of Conservation Voters said, “Even as energy prices are skyrocketing because of Trump administration policies, today they are again prioritizing Big Polluters over hardworking families. Clean energy is simply the cheapest and fastest energy to bring online so we can all have lower costs and cleaner air and water.”
“The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that they’re willing to sacrifice the health and safety of coal miners and the people living near mines and power plants in order to benefit the coal barons and other billionaires,” said Chelsea Barnes of Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit based in North Carolina.
“Today, solar, wind, and battery storage are the cheapest and fastest ways to bring new power to communities and businesses,” added Ted Kelly of the Environmental Defense Fund. “It makes no sense to cut off your best, most affordable options while doubling down on the most expensive ones.”
Ian Rose is a science and nature writer. His recent work has appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and elsewhere
