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from Washington. Well, it's an industry that's been in decline for decades. Donald Trump is
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tonight signing an executive order aimed at expanding mining and the use of coal. You
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can see there in those live images coming in to us from the U.S. The order itself will
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direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining, will also loosen
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environmental reviews of coal projects. Well, it isn't the first time Trump has pledged to bring back coal
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During his first term in office, he promised to revive the industry. That didn't pan out, though, and the US coal production
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and employment continued to fall. But this time, there is an added impetus
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the electricity-guzzling tech sector, as Siobhan Silk explains. It's an industrial revolution-era power source
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and Donald Trump wants it to power the AI revolution. He believes coal is what's needed to feed the energy-hungry data centres
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used by AI platforms, a demand that's predicted to skyrocket in the near future
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Over the past 25 years, coal-fired plants' share of electricity generation in the US
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dropped from 50 to 16 In parallel coal production has been in steady decline Trump is determined to reverse those trends but at what cost Most of the coal produced in the US comes from strip mines and
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mountaintop removal, which cause huge damage to the immediate environment. And the extraction is
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just the first part. Trump calls it beautiful, clean coal, but that's a huge misnomer. When
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burned, coal produces more greenhouse gases than any other fossil fuel and releases dangerous
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particulate pollution into the air. Public health researchers found that pollution from coal-fired
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plants killed almost half a million people in the US in the first two decades of this century
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The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that around 40,000 people currently work in the coal
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industry down from 70,000 10 years ago. Much of that decline happened during the first Trump
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administration, though he had promised to revive coal jobs then. While the Biden administration
2:16
funded programs to retrain coal industry workers for the renewable energy sector
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Trump has tried to roll back supports for clean energy. But the renewables industry is growing
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despite those efforts. As companies look at the bottom line, renewable power plants are
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fast to build and provide much cheaper energy than fossil fuels
