Trump signs executive orders to boost coal industry

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00:00From Washington, well, it's an industry that's been in decline for decades.

00:05Donald Trump is tonight signing an executive order aimed at expanding mining and the use of coal.

00:12You can see there in those live images coming in to us from the U.S.

00:16The order itself will direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining.

00:21It will also loosen environmental reviews of coal projects.

00:26Well, it isn't the first time Trump has pledged to bring back coal.

00:31During his first term in office, he promised to revive the industry.

00:35That didn't pan out, though, and the U.S. coal production and employment continue to fall.

00:41But this time, there is an added impetus, the electricity guzzling tech sector, as Siobhan Silk explains.

00:49It's an industrial revolution era power source,

00:53and Donald Trump wants it to power the AI revolution.

00:57He believes coal is what's needed to feed the energy-hungry data centres used by AI platforms,

01:03a demand that's predicted to skyrocket in the near future.

01:08Over the past 25 years, coal-fired plants' share of electricity generation in the U.S.

01:13dropped from 50% to 16%.

01:16In parallel, coal production has been in steady decline.

01:19Trump is determined to reverse those trends, but at what cost?

01:25Most of the coal produced in the U.S. comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal,

01:30which cause huge damage to the immediate environment.

01:33And the extraction is just the first part.

01:36Trump calls it beautiful, clean coal, but that's a huge misnomer.

01:41When burned, coal produces more greenhouse gases than any other fossil fuel

01:45and releases dangerous particulate pollution into the air.

01:50Public health researchers found that pollution from coal-fired plants

01:53killed almost half a million people in the U.S. in the first two decades of this century.

01:59The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that around 40,000 people

02:04currently work in the coal industry, down from 70,000 10 years ago.

02:08Much of that decline happened during the first Trump administration,

02:11though he had promised to revive coal jobs then.

02:14While the Biden administration funded programs to retrain coal industry workers

02:19for the renewable energy sector, Trump has tried to roll back supports for clean energy.

02:25But the renewables industry is growing despite those efforts.

02:29As companies look at the bottom line,

02:32renewable power plants are fast to build

02:34and provide much cheaper energy than fossil fuels.

02:37Cancelكر

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