Stivers backs Trump promise of coal jobs revival. KY energy experts are doubtful
Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers last week championed the Trump Administration’s recent executive orders aimed at buoying and prolonging the life of the coal industry, saying the orders will not only help “restore and refurbish” existing coal plants, but they will help position Kentucky to be a coal-powered “energy hub.”
“There will be pools of money that, instead of going to the renewables, will be going to the carbon-based, coal fire-generated plants to help upgrade them, make them more efficient, more environmentally friendly, to have cleaner coal burned, and to basically invest in them instead of shutting them down,” Stivers said during a Tuesday news conference in Frankfort.
As he spoke, a television screen behind him displayed a billowing Kentucky flag overlaid by the words “Unleashing Kentucky Energy.”
Stivers also undermined the scientific consensus that fossil fuels directly cause climate change.
“The assumption that fossil fuels are a contributor to climate change is subject to debate,” he said. “I can’t say that it is or is not.”
But two energy experts who spoke with the Herald-Leader said not only are fossil fuels the primary driver of the warming planet, the idea that Trump’s orders will breathe viable life into an otherwise declining industry is pie in the sky.
The presidential push for coal, they said, is unlikely to change the market’s increased focus on cleaner, more reliable forms of energy production, including natural gas and renewable energy like solar and wind.
“You have not seen, for more than a decade, any new construction for coal-fired plants,” said Tom Fitzgerald, former director of the Kentucky Resources Council. “And nothing in these executive orders is going to change that. They’re not going to change the fortune of coal.”
As coal plants become older and more costly to operate, Fitgerald said renewables are becoming more inexpensive and increasingly efficient.
“The markets don’t make investment decisions based on executive orders, regardless of how many adjectives you use to describe coal,” he said.
As for Stivers’ assertion that it’s “subject to debate” whether fossil fuels are causing climate change, Fitzgerald said it’s not up for debate.
“The fact that a person may not want to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence of fossil fuels’ and hydrocarbons’ contribution to climate change doesn’t make it debatable,” Fitzgerald said. “It just makes you wrong.”
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a 2023 published report, definitively found that “human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming.”
The annual average of greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2019 were “higher than any previous decade on record,” with the “largest share and growth in gross greenhouse gas emissions occurring in carbon dioxide from fossil fuels combustion and industrial processes,” the report found.
“You can pass an executive order tomorrow that says the Earth is flat. That doesn’t change the arc of the Earth,” Fitzgerald said. “You can pass an order saying the sun revolves around the Earth. That doesn’t make it a matter of debate.”
An industry ‘basically pushed out of business’
Kentucky’s ties to the coal industry is decades-old, and for many, personal.
The boon of coal production once built thriving towns, employed generations of Kentuckians with reliable, good-paying jobs, and churned out cheap, homegrown energy. The industry also marred Kentucky’s lands and waterways and sickened generations of miners with mine-related illnesses, including Black Lung Disease.
Over time, tightly-gripped reliance on coal in lieu of other energy sources, even as much of the country has sought to diversify its energy portfolio, has weakened the state’s economic advantage, Fitzgerald said.
The volume of coal produced from surface and underground mines, combined, in Kentucky has generally declined since about 2006, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.
During his first term as president, Trump made a promise he couldn’t keep: to revive the coal industry.
But there were fewer people employed in coal mines at the end of his term than at the beginning, nationally and in Kentucky. In January 2017 when Trump first took office, roughly 51,000 people were employed in the industry across the country, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By January 2021, that amount had dropped to 37,900.
On the campaign trail ahead of his second term, Trump mentioned coal production far less, but he still vowed to continue his first term’s work of gutting environmental regulations and greasing permitting wheels in ways that would benefit fossil fuels over renewable energy production.
That, so far, is a promise he has kept, though its intended effects are even less likely than they were in his first term to pan out long-term, Fitzgerald said.
Earlier this month, Trump signed a pair of executive orders that advantage the coal industry by easing restrictions on mining; allowing the Interior Department to resume coal leasing on millions of acres of public lands; and by ordering a federal study on whether more coal-fired power plants could supply electricity for artificial intelligence data centers.
A related executive order from Trump also charges the Justice Department with going after states who’ve passed laws requiring energy production to come from renewables rather than fossil fuels. The order characterizes such policies disparagingly, as “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”
Trump, during a signing ceremony, vowed to “end the government bias against coal.”
Stivers attended this signing at the White House, posting to X that day that “coal is making a comeback!”
“I was quite surprised at how similar (Trump’s) message was to the message we’ve been delivering from the legislature,” the Manchester Republican told reporters Tuesday.
Joe Craft, the Republican mega donor and CEO of Alliance Resource Partners, which operates a coal mine in Uniontown, Kentucky, was also at the White House that day.
The GOP-controlled Kentucky General Assembly in recent years has tried to slow both the market transition away from coal, as well as the retirement of coal-fired power plants.
In 2023, Republicans passed Senate Bill 4 to make it harder to retire coal plants by mandating the Kentucky Public Services Commission, the state’s utilities regulator, impose a series of prerequisites before it approves a utility’s request to retire a coal plant.
In 2024, the GOP passed another law building off this measure in Senate Bill 349. It codifies a series of regulatory hurdles that block the Public Services Commission from retiring aging coal plants too quickly, in part by establishing an 18-member Energy Planning and Inventory Commission that’s charged with reviewing requests to close those fossil fuel-fired power plants before the commission can approve or deny a retirement.
Trump’s orders are in line with these policies, Stivers said. By creating a “better dynamic for the permitting, mining and distribution of coal,” and by “easing the ability to extricate those minerals from the ground to get them on the market,” it will set Kentucky up to “be a low-cost energy producer.”
This flies in the face of the Biden Administration, Stivers said, which was “very adverse to the coal industry, creating a lot of impediments and hurdles for the mining and permitting, including restricting government lands, where there happens to be substantial resources.”
Those impediments have resulted in the coal industry “basically (being) pushed out of business,” he said.
When Stivers first joined the legislature in 1997, Kentucky generated roughly $300 million annually in coal severance tax, he said Tuesday. In the last few years, that figure has been closer to $100 million — “a reflection of production,” he said.
Not only will the executive orders pave the way to put miners “back to work” in Kentucky, he said, “it’ll be all the peripheral jobs that will come back, that you’ll see that used to be there, (like) supply stores, lumber companies, little grocery stores, mom and pop operations. That’s the hope.”
But Kent Chandler, who co-chaired the Kentucky Public Services Commission for more than four years before resigning in 2024, told the Herald-Leader he didn’t agree with that assessment.
“I don’t think the executive orders are going to lead to a long-term expansion of the industry,” he said. “And I would be incredibly surprised if you saw more than a few nibble at brand new coal production in Kentucky.”
There’s “absolutely no doubt” that incentives for renewable energy under previous presidential administrations, coupled with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “stringent environmental compliance regime . . . has some impact on the life expectancy of coal plants in the U.S.,” Chandler said.
But to blame the unrelenting decline of the fossil fuel industry on those regulatory hurdles just isn’t true, he said.
By definition, nearly all of these fossil fuel-powered power plants are older, for one, which means at a certain point it’s more expensive to continue relying on them than it is to build something newer and more efficient, Chandler said.
“This is like having an older car. If money wasn’t an issue, you can spend what ever you need to keep them going, or to completely refurbish them,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter how you refurbish them, they’re going to be less efficient than a new car you buy, they’re just not going to run on as many miles of gas, and the cost to keep them going is just going to be more.”
The last coal plant was built in this country in 2013, Chandler said, and “the cost to keep them going is going to be more, even if they’ve been completely refurbished.”
Coal’s once ‘competitive edge’ now an economic ‘burden’
Chandler does expect the orders to benefit some younger coal plants that are still marginally considered economically viable by helping them stay open for another five or 10 years. But even then, “you’re not going to see a sustained long-term increase in demand, but you just just see a continuation of existing demand,” Chandler said.
For the last roughly 60 years, “there’s been just a (downward) slide in the number of coal miners employed in the state, and I don’t see a handful of executive orders that only addresses a portion of the reasons for that, to materially change the direction of that trend,” he added.
“If the coal industry is a person treading water, I would say these executive orders are like taking weight off their shoulders,” Chandler said. “They are definitely not, in my opinion, rescuing them or throwing them a buoy. (The orders) prolong their ability to continue to operate at the margin.
“It is not, however, going to be a savior in the way of rescuing them.”
Fitzgerald agreed.
“For many years coal had an edge as the fuel for electric generation — we had among the lowest blended cost of electricity, bar none, among the 50 states,” he said. “The relatively inexpensive nature of Kentucky electricity meant that we didn’t build smart in terms of energy efficiency . . . because it was dirt cheap.”
But the “reality is that over the course of a generation, what was the competitive edge for Kentucky is now increasingly becoming a burden.”
In his news conference, Stivers didn’t push back on the notion that Kentucky will have to pivot its energy production, eventually.
“There’s no doubt we’re going to have to change in this nation some of our thought processes about energy, production, dispatchability and reliability,” Stivers said. “But for now, this is the cheapest, most reliable, affordable energy source we have.”
Senate Caucus Chair Robby Mills, R-Henderson, told the Herald-Leader he views Trump’s orders as restoring a “centrist” approach of energy production, one that doesn’t prioritize renewables and disadvantage coal, but also includes an “all of the above approach,” which includes coal, nuclear, and “intermittent” solar and wind.
Mills predicts over the next 15 to 20 years, “fossil fuels are still going to be a very active part of the mix.”
He believes more coal plants would be built if utilities could offer certainty that fossil fuel plants “would be held harmless on future environmental controls” that may shift under a president that doesn’t champion coal in the way Trump does.
But as much of the country has grappled with climate change spurred by the burning of fossil fuels, which has partly given way to the market’s trend toward relying on other forms of energy, the perception that coal is a worthwhile cost-effective, efficient or clean energy source in the long run ignores the bigger evolving energy landscape, Fitzgerald said.
“I get that there’s frustration, that there’s some sense that the region has been treated unfairly in this energy transition,” he said. But attempting to “game the regulatory process for utilities to favor coal” will only cost the ratepayers more in the long run.
“You may force a utility, and in turn force the ratepayers, to pay for the maintenance and operation costs for aging, uneconomic coal-fired plants because you’ve placed barriers to their formal retirement,” Fitzgerald said.
But it “doesn’t mean you’re going to increase the market share of coal that’s sold for electric generation, (and) it doesn’t mean you’re going to bring back coal jobs.”
Herald-Leader writer Bill Estep contributed to this story.
