I have some clean coal right here. So clean it's invisible.

As part of his exercise in stringing together sentences in a totally non-sequential, nonfactual, nonsensical way, Donald Trump spent a few moments in Phoenix bragging about clean coal.

“We've ended the war on beautiful, clean coal, and it's just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they're going to take out clean coal — meaning, they're taking out coal, they're going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania,” Trump said, completely misrepresenting what clean coal is.

This paragraph was literally wedged between one on the Supreme Court and another on Confederate statues, so it’s not clear that Trump was doing more than running down his list of grievances. (It’s always Festivus for Trump.) But on the off chance anyone paid attention to the content of these sentences and didn’t just bask in the outrage … that’s not how it works.

Coal coming from a mine is not clean, though it’s often “cleaned.” Not by legions of workers armed with toothbrushes, as Trump’s words might imply, but by crushing the coal and running it through a “Preparation Plant” to reduce the amount of ash and sulfur. Only, what comes out the other end … is not clean coal.

The term clean coal is used for a series of technologies meant to reduce the carbon emissions of coal, usually by capturing the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal and either storing it underground or converting it to some other form. There’s no such thing as a clean coal mine. And actually, there’s no such thing as a clean coal power plant. Kemper, the first plant in the United States designed to carry out carbon capture, was switched to natural gas over the summer after the efforts to create clean coal technology turned into a $7 billion boondoggle.

After years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, Mississippi regulators on Wednesday called on Southern to work up a deal that would have the Kemper plant fueled only by gas. …

There is a Trump phrase that’s a perfect replacement for “clean coal.” It’s “fake news.”