Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump loves coal more than anyone this side of Joe Manchin. He has a real lock on the 40,000 remaining coal miners in the U.S. (down from 100,000 in the early 2000s, so not a growth industry). Coal miners make around $50K. Trump has tried to help the miners and the industry by using his emergency powers to force aging and polluting coal plants to keep operating, even when the owners want to shut them down for business reasons.
In his bid to bring coal back from the dead, Trump has ordered millions of acres of federal land
opened
for coal mining. But something strange happened on the way to the gold coal rush. The electric-power industry is
not interested. Auctions in Utah have been scheduled and rescheduled for lack of bids. For a tract in Montana, there has
been only one bid. It was from the Navajo Transitional Electric Company. The tribe offered to mine 167 million tons of
coal but was willing to pay only 1¢ per ton for it. The bid was way below the market value and the Bureau of Land
Management rejected it. Basically, coal auctions are failing all over because the power companies want to invest in 21st
century power generation, not 19th century technology. Using coal to power an AI data center would seem ironic, to say
the least. (V)