Oil and gas, not coal, are dominating President Trump’s energy messaging in the home stretch of this election.
Whereas in 2016, Trump regularly boasted on the campaign trail of his plans to bring coal miners back to work, the president is far more focused on fracking this cycle.
Part of the reason is Trump is attempting to seize politically on comments his Democratic rival Joe Biden made during the last presidential debate Thursday that he would “transition from” oil as part of his climate change plans. Biden ultimately softened his comments, saying he was referring to ending oil subsidies and noting, “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.”
Trump, though, is hoping the comments are enough to worry voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and other fossil fuel-heavy states.
During three back-to-back rallies Monday in Pennsylvania, Trump said Biden would end fracking and put in place new regulations on fossil fuels, costing jobs in the state.
“Let me be clear: I will not ban fracking in Pennsylvania. I will protect Pennsylvania jobs,” Biden said during a competing campaign event in the state Monday. “Period. No matter how many times Donald Trump lies.”
However, Trump’s fewer mentions of coal also show how the political battle lines over energy policy are shifting as cheap natural gas has overtaken coal as the dominant source of electricity in the United States. Falling renewable energy costs, too, are proving an economic threat to coal. Last year, the U.S. consumed more energy from renewable sources than from coal for the first time since before 1885, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Even as the Trump administration has peeled back environmental regulations affecting coal plants, it hasn’t changed the trajectory of the industry. In 2019, U.S. coal production reached its lowest levels since 1978, the EIA said.
Intensifying concerns about climate change are playing a role, too. Most energy analysts, and certainly environmental groups, see a diminishing role for U.S. coal in a carbon-constrained future. Many major utilities across the country are moving rapidly away from coal as they chart courses for net-zero emissions by 2050. More coal plants have retired during Trump’s first term than in either of former President Barack Obama’s terms in office, according to EIA data.
Even some major U.S. miners are shrinking production of thermal coal, used in power plants.
“Dig we must. Clean coal. I don’t call it coal. I call it clean coal,” Trump said Monday during his rally in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, addressing a group of coal miners in the crowd.
“We brought it back,” he added. “We’re selling now coal to Vietnam and many, many places.” Indeed, Vietnam imported its first shipment of U.S. coal in July, but energy analysts don’t expect such an export market to revive demand for U.S. coal.
Moody’s Investor Service, in a research note earlier this month, said a second Trump term wouldn’t stem declines of thermal coal in the U.S. despite expectations the administration would continue a policy agenda generally favorable to coal. “[E]fforts to this point have been insufficient to reverse the decline in demand that started in the late 2000s,” the report said.
Moody’s added the export market “is insufficient to pick up the slack even in an improving price environment scenario.”
In perhaps another sign of the shifting politics, Trump is attempting to compare a coal-related gaffe of Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 to Biden’s recent comments on transitioning from oil.
Clinton, when touting her plans to move coal workers to renewable energy jobs, said then, “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” She later said in her memoir the comment was the moment she regretted most from her campaign.
Biden, meanwhile, has taken little heat for a comment he made during the first presidential debate that “nobody’s going to build another coal-fired plant in America.”
Trump, in Martinsburg on Monday, recalled Clinton’s comment. “Four weeks later, she ended up in West Virginia. That did not work out well for her,” Trump said.
“Remember she was trying to explain she was just kidding,” Trump added, saying Biden is similarly trying to say “he was just kidding” about his oil comments.
