A Black and Sooty Mess

Casting a lifeline to the sinking coal industry and its shrinking work force, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday a plan to weaken regulations of coal-fired power plants that President Barack Obama had put in place as part of an effort to reduce America’s emissions of planet-warming gases. The plan is wrongheaded on every level.

It favors an old, dirty fuel and does nothing to accelerate the push toward the cleaner, renewable fuels on whose development the world is depending for real progress against global warming. It offers another false promise to the coal miners, whose industry is threatened not by some sinister “war on coal,” as President Trump would have it, but by market forces, including plentiful supplies of cleaner natural gas. And it is another sign — the latest of many — that the president has no remorse for abdicating the leadership America once claimed in the struggle against climate change.

For good measure, the proposal would also weaken provisions in the clean air laws designed to regulate pollutants like smog and soot and, in so doing, cause as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths annually by 2030, as well as many thousands of respiratory infections because of increases in fine particulate matter linked to heart and lung disease.

The Obama plan, finalized in 2015, was designed to help drive down carbon dioxide emissions from power plans by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and was a crucial component of Mr. Obama’s pledge at the Paris climate summit meeting in 2015 to reduce America’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by more than one-quarter below 2005 levels by 2025. To that end, it set firm targets for each state, but gave those states wide latitude in deciding how to reach them — improving in energy efficiency, switching from dirty coal to cleaner natural gas, building wind farms, emissions trading among the states. The targets and methods for reaching them were worked out in lengthy, detailed consultation with the states to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.

The Trump plan, by contrast, would not set hard targets and would limit states to basically a single solution, a so-called “inside the fence line” measure aimed solely at improving the efficiency of existing plants. This could provide incentives for some states to keep aging coal-fired plants running, adding millions of tons of pollutants to the atmosphere each year.

But will the Trump plan really help the coal miners? Maybe at the margins, and therein lies the injustice to the miners. Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan appeared at a propitious moment, acting as a kind of accelerant to the big utilities that were already moving away from coal for reasons of economy and efficiency. According to the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration and the companies themselves, carbon dioxide emissions from power plants have already dropped by 25 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels — 12 years ahead of the Obama 2030 target date. Improvements in energy efficiency across the economy as a whole have had a lot to do with that, but so has the switch to natural gas and renewables and the consequent retirement of hundreds of aging, inefficient coal plants. More than 200 such plants, about 40 percent of those in America, have been retired since 2010 or are scheduled to retire. Coal jobs have fallen from nearly 180,000 in 1985 to around 50,000 today.

Given that landscape, it is hard not to sympathize with the coal miners, their families and their communities. But the right response lies in finding ways to train these workers for a new energy economy, which the Trump administration has hardly talked about. They are not served by the kind of bizarre pep talk Mr. Trump delivered at a rally in West Virginia on Tuesday night, where he said that coal was the only energy source that could survive a war. “We love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal,” he said. “And you know, that’s indestructible stuff. In times of war, in times of conflict, you can blow up those windmills, they fall down real quick. You can blow up those pipelines, they go like this,” he said, making a hand gesture. “You could do a lot of things to those solar panels, but you know what you can’t hurt? Coal.”

A long legal battle lies ahead. The Obama plan is already hung up in the courts. The Trump substitute will get there eventually. At the heart of the fight will be differing interpretations of the government’s duties under the Clean Air Act, which the Obama administration construed expansively (and correctly in our view) to allow a variety of weapons to be deployed against carbon dioxide, and the Trump administration’s much more cramped view, which would leave us stuck with an outdated energy system.

In the end, the real value of the Obama plan lay not so much in setting numerical targets as in its attempt to win widespread acceptance of a common problem, the very real threat from the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change. Mr. Obama knew well that his was but one step toward decarbonizing the world economy, and that further incentives and pressures would be required. Mr. Trump’s defense of the status quo sends a different and disheartening signal.