At a raucous political rally in West Virginia last year, just hours after the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to roll back the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, Donald Trump amused the crowd with talk of blowing up clean energy. “We love [coal], right?” he said while the crowd repeatedly cheered “Trump Trump Trump,” encouraging him on. "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 do a lot of things to those solar panels. But you know what you can’t hurt? Coal."
The EPA followed through on Trump’s love affair with dirty energy this week when it finalized the process for replacing the Clean Power Plan—Obama’s signature climate initiative for reducing carbon pollution and particulate matter from the nation’s energy sector—with the so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule. At best, the new rule will do nothing to regulate dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from coal-burning power plants, and at worst, ramp those emissions back up.
As the world careens towards a climate crisis with untold implications for current and future generations, the Trump administration has answered the call of history with a call to do nothing. There is perhaps no better example of this than the Affordable Clean Energy rule—a cynical attempt to bolster “indestructible” coal, and with it, the status quo. | 
