‘The Coal Industry Is Back,’ Trump Proclaimed. It Wasn’t. – by Eric Lipton (New York Times – October 5, 2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/

PAGE, Ariz. — For decades, waves of electricity poured from this behemoth of a power plant on the high desert plateau of the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, lighting up hundreds of thousands of homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas as it burned 240 rail cars’ worth of coal a day.

But as the day shift ended here at the Navajo Generating Station one evening early this year, all but a half-dozen spaces in the employee parking lot — a stretch of asphalt larger than a football field — were empty.

It was a similar scene at the nearby Kayenta coal mine, which fueled the plant. Dozens of the giant earth-moving machines that for decades ripped apart the hillside sat parked in long rows, motionless. Not a single coal miner was in sight, just a big, black Chihuahuan raven sitting atop a light post.

Saving these two complexes was at the heart of an intense three-year effort by the Trump administration to stabilize the coal industry and make good on President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to end “the war on coal.”

“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump promised soon after taking office. He didn’t.

For the rest of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/us/politics/trump-coal-industry.html