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coal
MAGA Stands for Make America Gasp Again
President Donald Trump’s energy strategy is optimized for the unbreathing.
Feb 20, 2026
Gasping for air is anything but greatness. It might be called the Gilded Age, but all that gold leaf was covered in soot.
In the early 1900s, America mistook combustion for unadulterated progress. Robber barons ascended like demigods from furnace-lit boardrooms. Children disappeared into textile mills and coal shafts. Rivers ran the color of industry—blackened, metallic, iridescent. Pittsburgh was said to have glowed at night, not from benign innovation but from the orange haze of its own exhaust. Entire cities learned to live in a permanent dusk. Laundry left outside returned streaked with ash. The sun became rumor.
We eventually decided that wasn’t, in fact, greatness. We regulated, conceding that lungs weren't an expendable input in the national ledger. And yet here we are in 2026, debating whether the air is worth protecting—this time in the service of artificial intelligence.
The logic now presented as bold and patriotic by the Trump administration would be comical if it weren't so terminal: Repeal climate constraints, unshackle coal, and power the next frontier of machines with the dirtiest fuel available. The argument arrives dressed in competitiveness. We must win the AI race. We must not be outpaced by China. We must dominate the 21st century. Yet the subtext is too hard to ignore. Coal is abundant and immediate. With the right rollbacks, it won't require the patience of permitting solar arrays or the political consensus of constructing nuclear reactors. No need for AI data centers in space; coal is a perfectly good accelerant with a proven track record on Earth.
The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in.
So why not use it to animate our new artificial friends?
There's a dark absurdity in this arrangement. AI doesn't breathe. It doesn't develop asthma. It doesn't mourn coral reefs or cough through wildfire season. It experiences no diminishment when particulate matter thickens the sky. To power AI with coal is to choose an energy source that is catastrophic for biological life but irrelevant to silicon. Suffice it to say, President Donald Trump’s energy strategy is optimized for the unbreathing.
Which leads to a suspicion so grotesque it borders on satire: The only mind for whom this is rational isn't a human one. Imagine, for a moment, a system trained to maximize output and dominate competitors at any cost. Surveying the energy landscape, it concludes that clean sources are intermittent or politically contested, whereas fossil fuels are dense, reliable, and already embedded in the infrastructure. Although increased carbon emissions degrade long-term human habitability, the system’s objective function contains no intrinsic preference for breathable air. Thus, the recommendation comes easy.
Power us with coal.
The more one turns this over, the more it feels less like policy and more like an algorithmic agenda. The idea is so inhumanly stupid—so hostile to the basic conditions of life—that it almost requires a nonhuman author, for no species dependent on oxygen would deliberately foul its own supply to train faster chatbots, unless it had forgotten that oxygen is the quintessential point. To return to coal at scale isn't nostalgia; it's regression. It is to resurrect a soot-choked republic and call it strength. It is to look at an era defined by black lung and industrial carnage and say: again.
This time around, rather than power railroads and steel, coal furnaces will power vast, humming warehouses of computation, data centers with appetites for electricity (not to mention water) that are already straining grids across the country. The irony is approaching theological. We once burned coal to build the modern world; now we would burn it to build our successor—a civilization that requires fresh air choosing to empower intelligences that do not. Two birds, one coal-black stone: Accelerate machine capacity and, in the process, weaken the biological substrate that might one day resist it.
Of course, no AI is secretly drafting executive orders. And no server farm has yet staged a coup. The more unsettling truth is that we don't need malevolent, self-aware machines to make machine-aligned decisions. It seems we are capable of aligning ourselves to their incentives. We've adopted the technocratic metrics of speed, scale, and dominance, subordinating everything else to them within the Silicon Valley of the shadow of death.
If the goal is to maximize computational throughput at any cost, coal makes a brutal kind of sense, especially from an artificial perspective. However, if the goal is to preserve a livable planet for oxygen-dependent beings, it does not. The Trump administration’s denial of the harms caused by greenhouse gases reveals which objective function it has chosen to operate.
The Gilded Age was gilded precisely because it was superficial. Beneath the gold plating lay a wasteland of exploitation, environmental ruin, and lives shortened in the name of industrial production. We learned, slowly and imperfectly, that some costs were too high, that air and water are more precious than gold. To reverse that lesson now, for the sake of an AI Revolution, is to confuse power with wisdom. It is to assume that because machines can model the world, they should determine the conditions under which we inhabit it.
Make America Great Again was once a slogan about memory. Make America Gasp Again would be a policy about forgetfulness. The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in. Coal is efficient for machines. It is lethal for us. And if we can't distinguish between those two facts, then the machines need not conspire at all.
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Trump Orders Pentagon to Purchase Coal Energy in Latest Move Propping Up Climate-Wrecking, Costly Plants
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," said one climate action advocate.
Feb 12, 2026
“The 19th century called, and it wants its fuel source back," said the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council on Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced his latest attempt to prop up the pollution-causing, expensive coal industry with taxpayer funds—this time by ordering the Pentagon to purchase electricity directly from coal-fired power plants.
"While Americans are demanding clean, affordable energy, the Trump administration is using our tax dollars to prop up the nation’s dirtiest, least efficient power plants," said Manish Bapna of the NRDC.
At an event at the White House, Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sign long-term, taxpayer-funded contracts with coal plants that would likely have otherwise been retired in the coming years, to purchase energy to power military installations.
"Hard to think of a dumber 21st Century energy and security policy than Trump's insistence that the Pentagon buy more coal power," said the Military Emissions Gap, a UK-based project that monitors military emissions data.
Trump also announced $175 million from the Energy Department to upgrade six coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia, and was presented with a trophy naming him the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal" by the Washington Coal Club.
The Trump administration's persistent efforts to cancel the planned closures of large coal plants have been challenged not only by more than a dozen state governments, but by the owners of at least one of the facilities and two utilities in Colorado.
The utilities, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, accused the administration of violating the Takings Clause of the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
They argued in a regulatory filing last month that “the costs of compliance fall directly on their members and customers, who must now pay."
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told the Washington Post that the administration's decision to compel coal plants to continue operating has raised household "energy bills while providing negligible benefits to consumers.”
“Each of the five plants were slated to retire because they are expensive to operate and there are cheaper sources of power available to meet consumers’ needs,” Peskoe told the Post. “Plant owners aren’t just flipping a switch to turn the plants back on—they are spending millions on maintenance, renewing expired coal contracts and rehiring workers.”
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is."
Bapna said Trump's latest actions on coal were the result of the president's campaign promise to fossil fuel executives, whom he asked for $1 billion in campaign donations and pledged to gut climate regulations in return.
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is," said Bapna. "The rest of us are left to pay the price: more heart disease and asthma attacks, higher utility bills, and more frequent unnatural disasters. This is a raw deal for our wallets, our health, and our future.”
Julie McNamara, associate policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out that Americans will face higher electricity bills and be forced to pay for the new Department of Defense contracts at a time when "people and businesses across the country are struggling with rapidly escalating electricity costs" while other countries around the world expand their use of far cheaper renewable energy sources.
"The country has real solutions at hand—yet instead of pushing ahead with investments in the fastest, cheapest, cleanest resources available, the Trump administration is actively doing everything it can to stop the deployment of new solar and wind projects, to stop investments in energy efficiency, and to stop the buildout of modern grid infrastructure," said McNamara.
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," she added. "The Trump administration’s flailings come with real consequences. Forcing the use of increasingly unreliable and relentlessly uneconomic coal plants will risk outages and send high electricity costs higher. Recklessly slashing health, safety, and environmental standards will harm people’s health and the environment. And opting for hollow statements and short-term bailouts fails to meaningfully deliver for the coal-dependent communities requiring actual, durable transition solutions."
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, suggested that Trump's latest handouts to coal firms "ignores basic economics" while also proving that "coal can't compete without a taxpayer-funded bailout."
"Our military is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world," said Alt. "Instead of improving the efficiency of our military and the quality of life for those serving our country, this order saddles taxpayers with inflated energy costs while exposing millions of Americans to more toxic pollution from old, inefficient plants."
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What Did the US People Do to Deserve Trump's Lump of Coal?
The Trump administration is trying to prop up coal at the expense of cheaper sources of energy like wind and solar that would benefit the nation as a whole.
Jan 14, 2026
A lump of coal is Santa’s proverbial gift to children who have been naughty. But what naughtiness makes Americans deserve the coal that the Trump administration is trying to inflict on us? The current incoherent energy policy will increase electricity prices even more than they would rise otherwise.
Admittedly, the coming demise of coal, which the administration may delay but not ultimately prevent, will be very hard on the people who work in the coal industry. And it will badly hurt communities where coal is the chief industry and states in which they are located.
Understandably, the coal industry has contributed generously to politicians who try to protect it, and its donations have paid very large dividends for that industry. But forcing electric utilities to keep burning coal, and stomping on potential competitors who could defeat it in any fair competition, is not the right way to protect the people and communities involved in a declining industry.
Government support for these people could take many more reasonable forms, including retraining programs, special support for schools and other local government services, and possibly even making workers eligible to collect Social Security and to be on Medicare before they would otherwise be old enough. These people should not be singled out to pay for the benefits that society as a whole will receive from abandoning the use of coal—the taxpayers as a whole owe it to them.
The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.
Rational policy would not try to protect people in particular energy industries. It would aim to create equal conditions within which all sources of energy could compete. The main present alternatives to coal include oil, natural gas, solar, wind, atomic, and geothermal sources. Each of these has its own unique combination of advantages and disadvantages.
During the last 200 years the world has shifted from one dominant energy source to another as technologies advanced and economic conditions changed. For a long time coal was the cheapest and most abundant fuel, but it was displaced by petroleum and, more recently, by natural gas. Each of these fuels prevailed because it was available and cheaper than the alternatives.
Atomic energy, at one time expected to take over and make electricity “too cheap to meter,” never took off to that extent for various reasons, not the least of which was its expense.
Thanks to research during the last half century, the cheapest sources are now solar panels and wind turbines. They are therefore the chief threats to the coal, oil, and natural gas industries, and especially to coal. That is why the Trump administration has concentrated on wiping out the wind turbine projects in the Atlantic Ocean, even those that are nearly finished and in which billions of dollars have been invested.
The administration claims that the offshore wind projects are a threat to national security, a possibility that had been thoroughly vetted and rejected by government experts before the projects began.
It also claims that wind and solar energy are unreliable, since the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. But these are only problems locally. The sun is always shining on exactly half the planet, and winds are always blowing somewhere.
The intermittency problem does not exist when we consider the world as a whole. Once we have connected up the whole planet into a single electrical grid—now entirely possible—solar and wind energy will be just as dependable as the older energy technologies. And they will be cheaper than the older technologies even when we include the cost of building and operating the grid that they will require.
If we want the cheapest possible electricity—and who doesn’t?—we should support creation of a level playing field for all possible sources of energy. The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.
Does this Republican administration believe in free markets or doesn’t it?
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