“Of course, it’s a human issue to me because my employees’ lives are being destroyed,” he will later say, recalling the event. His Ohio-headquartered company, Murray Energy, is the largest privately-owned coal firm in the US and the fourth-highest producer of the material in the country. It’s a special moment for him, having been one of Trump’s biggest public supporters in the build-up to the polls. It’s just nine weeks after his unlikely election victory and Donald Trump is standing on a small stage at the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency, where he is making a special appearance to call for a review of the Clean Power Plan.īehind him are stood more than a dozen coal miners, whose jobs he swears to protect from the red tape of green bureaucracy as he launches an executive order that could eventually lead to the repealing of his predecessor Barack Obama’s signature climate change policy.Īt one stage, he points in the direction of Bob Murray, sitting in the front row. But as new data shows power generation from the mineral fell to a 43-year low in 2019 and renewables look set to overtake coal production for the first time ever this year, James Murray explores what went wrong.

When Donald Trump was elected to the White House in 2016, he pledged to revive a US coal industry that was in seemingly terminal decline due to his predecessor Barack Obama’s stringent regulations on fossil fuels.

Trump said his administration would 'take care of a lot of years of horrible abuse' towards the coal industry (Credit: Shutterstock/1427778647) Over the past decade, more than 50 coal companies have gone bankrupt and over 100GW of coal capacity has either retired or announced plans to retire

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