Trump is handing out public land and millions of dollars to revive big coal, sending advocates reeling

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — While the Trump administration wages war against clean energy, it is now vowing to lease millions of acres of public lands at a discount and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the most polluting source of electricity: coal.

This comes as the administration has restricted new solar and wind farms on federal lands, and decried subsidies provided to these two renewable energy sources.

The new policies announced Monday include giving $625 million to utilities to extend the life of aging, coal-fired power plants. Such facilities would likely otherwise close because of the availability of cheaper energy sources.

The coordinated actions from the departments of Interior, Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency would seek to open as much as 13.1 million acres of federal land to coal mining at reduced royalty rates. In addition, the EPA would ease regulations on water and air pollution to allow for the extension of coal power plants’ lifetimes.

Currently, coal provides about 16% of the United States’ electricity, a share that has fallen steeply in recent years as the cost of natural gas, wind and solar energy has come down, and anti-pollution regulations have helped to convince utilities to close coal power plants.

Coal mining has also fallen out of favor in recent decades as demand for the fuel has declined. Coal is the energy source that produces the most global warming pollution, and its decline in the US had been helping to reduce the nation’s emissions.

Environmental groups denounced the new moves as a waste of money, a threat to public health and a step backward in the fight against human-caused global warming.

“Expanding mining and spending taxpayer money on burning coal, while rolling back vital health protections, will only exacerbate the deadly pollution and rising electricity bills that communities are facing across the country,” said Jill Tauber of Earthjustice in a statement. “Clean energy and other climate solutions are driving significant growth in our economy, but this administration is choosing to throw its weight behind fossil fuel industries and stymie progress.”

“The Trump administration’s attempts to ban clean energy and prop up dirty and costly coal will not only cause costs to keep going up, but will also risk the health of our communities and threaten public lands that belong to all of us,” said Matthew Davis of the League of Conservation Voters, in a statement.

The Trump administration, however, sees coal as a reliable source of baseload power at a time when such energy sources are at a premium given rising electricity demands amid the artificial intelligence boom.

The White House is prioritizing such energy sources, be it coal or nuclear power plants, over the cheapest sources of electricity today, which are wind and solar.

“Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. “These funds will help keep our nation’s coal plants operating and will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.