US Wants To Restart Shuttered Coal-Fired Generating Stations
It’s Looney Tunes time in Assington, DC, where the climate criminals keep coming up with ways to destroy the environment for fun and profit. Last week, Chris Wright, the putative “energy secretary” for the United States told African leaders that coal is the solution to a widespread lack of energy access in Africa, dismissing the challenge posed by climate change and saying there is too much emphasis on calling burning coal “destructive.” In one fell swoop, Wright and the so-called president are thumbing their noses at all the nations which committed to the Paris Climate Accords in 2015. This is real “true believer” stuff that is resistant to reason or rationality in any form.
Speaking to a roomful of African officials and business people at a Powering Africa summit in downtown Washington last week, Wright said Western countries such as the United States have for years been “shamelessly” telling Africa that coal is bad and not to develop it. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense,” he said. “Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities, and coal globally will be the largest source of electricity for decades to come. That’s not a policy, that’s not a desire, that’s just a reality. Where is the COP conference for this far more urgent global challenge?” he asked. “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”
Let’s Bring Back Coal, And Asbestos, And Freon
Wright stopped short of calling for the revival of asbestos insulation, Freon for air conditioning units, or the use of DDT in agriculture. Those things also transformed the world and provided opportunities, although they had an unfortunate tendency to shorten the lives of those who came in contact with them. And why stop there? Why not start a campaign to get Africans to take up cigarette smoking while we’re at it? Big Tobacco was severely harmed by all the hysteria about lung cancer. Why is no one talking about that, huh?
Not everyone is buying Wright’s bombast. “One of the transformations caused by American fossil fuels was destroying our previously well-balanced climate and plunging some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa into a life dealing with extreme weather and lost homes and livelihoods,” Mohamed Adow, a founding director of Power Shift Africa, a non-governmental organization based in Nairobi. The African continent also had huge potential to expand renewable energy, “but lacks the right investments to exploit these resources,” said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African group of negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change.
Wright is too dumb to know — or care — that one of the biggest challenges for sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of electrical grids throughout much of the continent. That is the primary reason renewables — especially solar — are ideal for Africa, as they provide local energy for local people. Much of Africa has adopted cell phones and skipped right over the era of telephone poles and wires. The same could happen with electricity. For those who have never had it, even a little thing like a light powered by a small solar panel can be a life altering experience.
Homegrown Coal For America
On March 10, 2025, Interior secretary Doug Burgum said the maladministration is considering the use of emergency authority created by one of the 4,612 executive orders signed in the past three weeks to bring back coal-fired generating stations that have closed and stop others from shutting down. He told Bloomberg Television in an interview at CERAWeek in Houston, “Under the national energy emergency, which President Trump has declared, we’ve got to keep every coal plant open, and if there had been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back.”
He added that Biden era policies were threatening the US power grid, necessitating emergency action. Since 2000, about 770 individual coal-fired units have retired, according to data from Global Energy Monitor, amid competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables, both of which are cheaper than coal. So what the MAGAlomaniacs are saying is that America should pump billions of tons more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so Americans can pay more for electricity. This is what you get when you elect morons to run the government.
Coal accounts for about 15% of power generation in the US today, down from more than half in 2000, according to the US Energy Information Administration. An additional 120 coal-fired power plants are scheduled to shut down in the next five years in part because of environmental regulations that have made them uneconomic, according to the America’s Power trade group representing utilities and miners such as Peabody Energy and Core Natural Resources. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups are calling BS on that. They claim coal-fired electricity is more expensive than renewable electricity and a source of dangerous global warming greenhouse gases as well as other dangerous pollutants. “The retired coal plants that Burgum wants to restart closed because they were expensive, polluting dinosaurs,” said Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “Restarting them would drive up people’s electricity rates when they can least afford it.”
The remarks from Burgum, who previously served as the governor of North Dakota, which is a major coal producing state, come as Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the administration is crafting a “market-based” plan to slow the closure of US coal-fired power plants as it seeks to supply more electricity before an expected boom in demand from artificial intelligence.
Corruption In High Places
This is naked corruption writ large. We all remember how during the last presidential campaign the Republican nominee told fossil fuel companies to pony up $1 billion to guarantee their every wish would be granted if he got elected. If Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton did that, they would be on their way to prison right now, but because it is the leader of the red team, who has appointed the Attorney General, the head of the FBI, and hundreds of federal prosecutors and judges — all of whom have pledged undying fealty to him — he gets a free pass and America takes another giant step toward being ruled by an organized crime syndicate. If you don’t think that’s true, consider this. The alleged president is selling invitations to private dinners with himself for $5 million a seat. If that doesn’t bother you, you might want to take an IQ test to determine if your mental acuity is higher than that of a rutabaga.
The standard line from Republicans is that economic forces should control who wins and who loses in the marketplace. But they blindly insist there is no economic harm from the emissions created by coal and methane when they are burned, which distorts the economics in favor of those fuels — in effect it is an indirect government subsidy, although Republicans refuse to understand that. So they lie and make up hogwash about an energy emergency, but we all know that is just a cover up for the payoff fossil fuel companies are getting in return from their generous campaign donations — another example of corruption at the highest levels that favors the wealthiest while ordinary citizens get a soapsuds enema from their government. Welcome to the land of MAGA, where magical thinking replaces science and greed triumphs over facts. This it happening, people, because:
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