By: Jacob Fischler – April 8, 2025 7:25 pm
President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aiming to invigorate the U.S. coal industry.
In wide-ranging comments in front of a phalanx of coal miners at the White House, Trump said the orders would revitalize an industry pushed to the brink by Democratic policies that encourage renewable energy.
“This is a very important day to me, because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.
The orders:
- End a moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal mining;
- Remove Biden administration environmental regulations that Trump said slow approvals of new mining projects;
- Prioritize grid security and reliability; and
- Direct the U.S. Justice Department to block states from enforcing their own regulations on coal.
Two of the orders cite increased energy demand for the power-intensive task of artificial intelligence data processing as the rationale for increasing coal production.
Reopening plans for mines in Montana, Wyoming
A press release from the Interior Department, which oversees resource management on public lands, added that one of the orders reopens plans to build mines in Montana and Wyoming, removes regulatory burdens on coal production and lowers royalty rates coal companies owe for production on federal lands.
Environmental groups cautioned against a renewed federal investment in coal and took particular exception to the provision allowing the federal government to undermine state efforts to move away from the sector.
“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands,” Tyson Slocum, the energy policy director for the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate.”
In a line that appeared ad-libbed, Trump also promised the orders could not be reversed by a future president.
“We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” he said. “We’re going to give a guarantee that it’s not going to happen, so that if somebody comes in, they cannot change it at a whim.”
Trump said he’d thought of the idea “about 15 minutes before” getting on stage at the White House.
‘Beautiful, clean coal’
Trump cast the move as a direct rebuke to his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and said it was in service of restoring working-class jobs in states like West Virginia.
“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. And it wasn’t just Biden, it was Obama and others, but we’re doing the exact opposite… We’re going to put the miners back to work.”
A 2024 Biden rule to raise emissions standards on coal plants was unworkable, one of the orders, which reversed the Biden rule, said.
“The Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form,” the order said. “The Rule therefore raises the unacceptable risk of the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants, eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects.”
With both U.S. senators from West Virginia, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, on hand, Trump said the state’s workers rejected Democrats’ vision of transitioning away from their mining identity.
“One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, but they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.”
Environmental groups slam orders
Even before the orders were signed, environmental advocacy groups panned them as a giveaway to the industry and a reckless move away from attention to the climate crisis.
“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander, the legal director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a written statement. “This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate.”
Lena Moffitt, the executive director of environmental group Evergreen Action, said true energy reliability would come from renewable sources.
“Coal is toxic and outdated,” Mofitt said in a statement. “It poisons our air and water, jacks up household energy bills, and is deadly for communities living under the shadow of its smokestacks. If Trump actually cared about meeting rising energy demand, he’d invest in affordable, clean power—not drag us backward to prop up a dying industry.”
Immigration and tariffs
Trump spoke for about 45 minutes and touched on issues beyond energy policy, including his recently enacted tariffs that have rocked world financial markets and the case of a Maryland man erroneously swept up in a deportation operation.
Trump promoted his aggressive immigration policy and referenced the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador despite being granted legal protection to remain in the United States.
The administration sent planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador mega-prison last month, accusing them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.
Without naming Abrego Garcia, Trump referenced a man sent to El Salvador who was not a member of the Venezuelan gang, but said he was a member of a different Latin American gang. The government has produced no evidence to suggest Abrego Garcia is a gang member.
On tariffs, Trump said the taxes on imported goods were already bringing in billions of dollars daily in new federal revenue and were critical to protect U.S. industries.
“We’ve been ripped off and abused by countries for many years with the tariff situation,” he said. “They’ve used tariffs against us. We didn’t use tariffs against them in any way, but we just didn’t use them of any monumental proportion. And so we are doing it now.”
He did not respond to a shouted question about Republican unease with the worldwide tariffs at the close of the White House event.
