The White House is announcing another waste of taxpayer dollars today, spending $700M to try to revive a dead energy source, saddling Americans with more pollution and infrastructure that is destined to go unused in short order. Here’s the thing: coal is dead, and everyone knows it. In the early 2000s, coal accounted for about half of US electricity generation. In 2024, it accounted for 15%. Both use and capacity have been dropping for a long time. This change didn’t happen because coal was outlawed, it happened because it’s a terrible energy source. It’s deadly, it’s unreliable, and it’s costly (and rapidly getting more costly). Advertisement - scroll for more content It’s not just the absolute worst energy source all things considered, it’s the worst energy source by most individual metrics, too. So the US has been rapidly backing away from coal for decades, and other countries are doing so too. Utilities are dropping coal from their portfolio because it doesn’t make sense to keep it. But that hasn’t stopped the enemies of America from trying to impose more pollution and higher costs on Americans, and they’re about to announce another effort to do so today. The White House is expected to spend another $700 million of taxpayer money to try to prop up a dying energy source which would only increase costs on Americans, during a time when Americans say cost of living is the worst they can ever remember. The plan, which will be announced today, is to use the Defense Production Act to authorize the emergency spending, which is a Cold War era law intended to facilitate mobilization for war. Notably, the only “war” being conducted here is the one on American people’s lungs and pocketbooks, and there is no actual emergency that will be solved by more expensive, unreliable, and polluting energy (but there’s certainly an emergency which will be made worse: climate change). The goal is to support 13 existing coal plants and even to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, which would be the first new coal plants built in the US since 2013. It would also reopen a closed coal plant in Maryland and open a coal export terminal in California. It’s the latest move to saddle Americans with higher energy costs, on top of a litany of other attacks from the White House trying to force fossil fuels and oppose cleaner, cheaper energy sources. The Energy Department has already wasted taxpayer money with huge coal grants, and has repeatedly forced broken coal plants to stay open at great cost. And DoE admits that its actions will raise your costs. The Department of the Interior cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service), and bribed a foreign oil company with $1B of taxpayer money to kill a clean energy project. And the EPA is doing its best to decrease your fuel efficiency, increase fuel costs and raise the cost of home efficiency improvements. The squatters heading each of these three departments are expected be present at the announcement today. Chris Wright from DoE is a former oil CEO, and Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin from Interior and EPA have both received hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from the fossil fuel industry over their political careers. Charge your electric vehicle at home using rooftop solar panels. Find a reliable and competitively priced solar installer near you on EnergySage, for free. They have pre-vetted installers competing for your business, ensuring high-quality solutions and 20-30% savings. It’s free, with no sales calls until you choose an installer. Compare personalized solar quotes online and receive guidance from unbiased Energy Advisers. Get started here. – ad* Stay up to date with the latest content by subscribing to Electrek on Google News. You’re reading Electrek— experts who break news about Tesla, electric vehicles, and green energy, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow Electrek on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our YouTube channel for the latest reviews.
+49 others
