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Washington, D.C. — According to reporting, today Donald Trump is set to announce plans to give away $700 million in taxpayer grants for aging, expensive, toxic coal plants—including grants to build two new coal plants—marking the latest in a string of costly bailouts for a collapsing industry. The U.S. has not built a new coal plant in more than a decade due to the staggering health costs and brutal economics.
According to Sierra Club’s Out of Control dashboard, coal pollution is responsible for 6,500 premature deaths in the United States every year—a number that will increase as the Trump administration continues to desperately keep the rapidly declining coal industry on life support. Trump’s Department of Energy has illegally extended the life of coal plants and Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has given coal plants numerous shortcuts and pollution passes, and dismantled lifesaving safeguards that protect communities from coal pollution.
Meanwhile, clean energy outperforms coal economically and does not lead to more hospital visits or missed work days. Yet rather than investing in cheap clean energy, the Trump administration has paid energy companies billions of dollars to cancel renewable energy projects.
