There Is No Such Thing as Clean Coal

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David Corn,
Washington, DC, bureau chief

Dear reader,

This is how it works. The big lie. The endless spin. The outright denial of facts. Again and again and again. In "William Barr's War on Reality, Truth, and the Law," I break down how far the attorney general is willing to go to erase the truth in order to protect the president. I hope you'll give it a read. And if you think we need more reporting that isn't afraid to call a lie a lie, I hope you'll pitch in with a year-end donation so we can reach our big $600,000 goal this month and keep on charging ahead in 2020.

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The final version of President Trump’s jihad against clean power has been released:

Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency has branded the rewrite as the Affordable Clean Energy rule and designed it to fulfill the president’s campaign promise to bring back the coal industry.

This kind of Orwellian branding has been around for a long time, but this really nails the whole genre. Clean energy = more coal. It’s the official version of Trump’s belief that if he says “clean coal” often enough, then coal will actually become clean.

I don’t know if this is just a routine lie on his part or if he’s really such a dunce that he doesn’t realize there’s no such thing. I don’t think anyone knows. But if Trump’s plan goes into effect, thousands more people will die and gigatons more carbon will be spewed into the air. And the jobs? They’ll keep declining because the cheapest coal is strip-mined out west, where it’s mostly done by machines. But I don’t suppose Trump knows that either.