Justin Fox, Columnist

Trump Is Too Late to Stop the Windmills

Coal isn't coming back. Technology and demand won't let it.

June 13, 2017 at 5:56 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

They're coming.
Photographer: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images

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There seems to be little doubt that Barack Obama's energy and environmental policies had a significant impact on how electricity is generated in the U.S. Tougher air-pollution rules, subsidies for wind and solar power, and a commitment to reduce carbon emissions coincided with a fracking-driven boom in natural gas production to shift the fuel mix in a big way:1497361836906

Now Donald Trump is president. He is an avowed friend of coal who has already signaled that he wants to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and put a stop to the Clean Power Plan that Obama's Environmental Protection Agency adopted to force continuing declines in carbon emissions by utilities. He also hates windmills.