Trump wants ratepayers to pay more for energy while increasing the incidence of deaths related to coal energy.

Trump has many friends in the coal industry, and their influence with him appears to be even higher after they gave him a trophy hailing him as the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.”

Trump has not only mandated more purchasing of coal energy for the U.S. Military, but now he is also demanding two Colorado coal energy plants halt their scheduled cost burden retirement against the wishes of the operating utility companies. Those costs from the delay will be passed along to consumers, even though there are cleaner energy sources available that come at lower cost to ratepayers and the environment.

Make no mistake: this is Trump taking a spiteful shit in our clean energy future bathtub just to muddy the waters of highly popular Democrat clean air and climate initiatives. The bile this president seems to have for our future children just keeps mounting as he creeps daily closer to his death bed.

When it comes to coal, there’s no such thing as “clean” and saying that is just another big lie from Trump.

When burning coal power plants are required to scrub their stacks to prevent many pollutants from entering our air in massive quantities (literally millions of tons per year.) Some of the poisons still get through no matter what the Coal industry says about ‘Clean Coal. When these particles, gasses, and fly ash do pass the scrubbers they increase the incidence of coal-related deaths among us humans and other wildlife. I’ll cover some of the worst offenders below.

CO2 – the one everyone knows

When measuring CO2 per BTU produced, coal is the worst offender except for Petroleum Coke aka “pet coke” which emits ~ 5-10 percent more CO2 – but Pet Coke is a subject I’ll break down in the future. Burning coal for energy is a massive contributor to modern climate change, contributing 15.8 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Coal is about the worst fuel in terms of adding to climate change and our human-driven warming trend.

The United States is the third worst contributor to CO2 generation from coal.

Coal Ash is poisonous, carcinogenic, and radioactive

Besides miners dying from coal production, (including silicosis, mesothelioma, and other diseases you get from breathing fine, radioactive particulates all day), people near coal energy plants also die in higher numbers from the effects of coal ash. Burning coal for energy produces highly poisonous coal ash, some of which gets out of the stack into the air the plant’s neighbors breath, and some of which much be mucked out and disposed of. Here’s a segment on that waste coal ash from Earth Justice :

“Coal ash contains hazardous pollutants including arsenic, boron, cobalt, chromium, lead, lithium, mercury, molybdenum, radium, selenium, and other heavy metals, which have been linked to cancer, heart and thyroid disease, reproductive failure, and neurological harm. Industry’s own data indicate that across the country 91% of coal plants are currently polluting groundwater above federal health standards with toxic pollutants.”

And from Scientific American:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

As I came of age I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the municipal utility system generated electricity from coal on the Southeast side of the subdivision I lived in, and the University of Alaska generated energy to the Northwest. Every Winter the snowbanks would transition from white, to gray, to eventual black after every snowfall as the coal ash settled on them and melted in.

Now at 70 I sleep with oxygen and a CPAP every night, and I can’t help but think that growing up in that coal dust could not have helped my resperation. I’m lucky in that I haven’t gotten lung cancer like both of my parents died from, but I have to wonder if coal or smoking did that to them.

I’m going to conclude now with words that even Trump can understand.

COAL BAD.