How American Coal Could Come Back Leaner and Cleaner

It’s been a wild month for the U.S. coal industry. When the Paris climate agreement entered into effect on November 5, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both thought they had signed the death warrant of the American coal industry. Just over two weeks later, the new president-elect has promised to undo the Obama era’s “job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy.” All of a sudden, coal has gone from black sheep to DC darling. Had Clinton won the White House, the Paris deal would have given her and her environmentalist backers the cover they needed to put every coal worker in the country out of business. The agreement seeks to limit global rise in temperatures below 3.6° Fahrenheit and promote the deployment of renewable energies. Obama, who had the whole agreement drafted in a way that would let him do a runaround on Congress, naturally hailed it as a “historic day” in the fight against global warming in which he himself was the main hero.