PAGE, Ariz. — For decades, waves of electricity poured from this behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo reservation in northwestern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of coal a day.
But as the day shift ended here at the Navajo Generating Station one evening early this year, all but a half-dozen spaces in the employee parking lot — a stretch of asphalt larger than a football field — were empty.
It was a similar scene at the nearby Kayenta coal mine, which fueled the plant. Dozens of the giant earth-moving machines that for decades ripped apart the hillside sat parked in long rows, motionless. Not a single coal miner was in sight, just a big, black Chihuahuan raven sitting atop a light post.
Saving these two complexes was at the heart of an intense three-year effort by the Trump administration to stabilize the coal industry and make good on President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to end “the war on coal.”
“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump
promisedsoon after taking office.
He didn’t.
Despite Mr. Trump stocking his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry,
rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only
accelerated in recent years.
...
In the years after Mr. Trump’s election, the federal government offered help valued at as much as $1 billion to keep this one power plant and coal mine up and running by embracing an industry plan to relax costly air-quality requirements.
A Republican lawmaker from Arizona
sought to force one of the state’s largest utilities to continue to buy power from the plant. Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, offered to discount the price of the coal it was selling the power plant from the Kayenta mine.
None of it proved to be enough. By late last year, both the Kayenta mine and the
Navajo Generating Station had gone offline, a high-profile example of the industry’s broader collapse and the resulting economic and political aftershocks
Alvin Long, 61, who spent nearly three decades maintaining the earth-moving machines at the Kayenta mine before it closed and remains unemployed, said the past several years have led him to reassess his political allegiance. After backing Republicans since the 1970s and voting for Mr. Trump in 2016, he said he was leaving the party.
“We really thought we had a chance to keep it going, when we voted for Trump,” he said. “
But I don’t care to listen to him anymore. All of his promises went down the drain.”
...
Since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, 145
coal-burning units at 75 power plants have been idled, eliminating 15 percent of the nation’s coal-generated capacity, enough to power about 30 million
homes.
...
That is the fastest decline in coal-fuel capacity in any single presidential term, far greater than the rate during either of President Barack Obama’s terms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/...tion=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
This president has no vision and without a vision the people perish. Hillary wanted to give the coal miners new jobs in a different industry, but the right wing media distorted her intent. Just think in the past 4 years if we had a president with vision who could have seen what is happening and gotten then new sustainable jobs, how different things would be. But the right will vote him back in and we will suffer another 4 years and just like after W, the democrats will have to come back in a bail out the money grabbing Republicans. They will be rich because they stole from the taxpayers and hard working citizens.
We will be left with a much bigger burden to carry while they are out on the yachts and golfing.