During his campaign for the White House, President-elect Donald Trump promised to eliminate regulations that target coal-fired power plants, one of the primary causes of carbon emissions responsible for climate change.
For Trump, a climate-change skeptic, getting rid of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would curb carbon emissions from power plants by 32% by 2030, would give a boost to the declining U.S. coal industry and its decimated workforce across Appalachia.
Even if the next president were to succeed, he would probably not reverse a years-long movement away from coal in the U.S. electric power industry, the biggest consumer of the black rock, according to the head of one of the nation’s leading electric utilities. (Read more)