Biden Goes All-In With War On Coal

The Biden administration’s war on coal came out of the shadows recently, with the release of a new series of regulations that have the clear intent of locking up millions of acres of federal land from coal mining and drilling for oil and natural gas, as well as shutting down the nation’s remaining coal-fired power generation fleet.

The Bureau of Land Management released a new rule that will effectively make it impossible to continue to mine coal or drill for oil and gas anywhere on federally owned lands. This will cripple coal mining in the Powder River Basin and other western reserves, which provide most of the nation’s thermal coal used for energy production. This action alone would have been devastating, but it was just part of a much larger and far-reaching series of regulatory actions.

The new tranche of regulations was an 11th hour assault, issued literally days before the close of a window of time allowing a new President to reverse the decision by executive order. With this announcement, any reversal will have to come through action by both houses of Congress or by litigation in court.

These actions come despite the clear warnings by some of the Biden Administration’s own electric utility regulators that further closures of baseload energy capacity (such as coal) could result in the failure of the nation’s electric grid.

The new regulations effectively make it impossible for utilities to continue to operate coal-fired power plants without investing in new, largely unproven commercially and highly expensive, carbon capture technologies capable of cutting 95% of carbon dioxide emissions. It would also require the

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