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00:00From Washington, well, it's an industry that's been in decline for decades.
00:05Donald Trump is tonight signing an executive order aimed at expanding mining and the use of coal.
00:12You can see there in those live images coming in to us from the U.S.
00:16The order itself will direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining.
00:21It will also loosen environmental reviews of coal projects.
00:26Well, it isn't the first time Trump has pledged to bring back coal.
00:31During his first term in office, he promised to revive the industry.
00:35That didn't pan out, though, and the U.S. coal production and employment continue to fall.
00:41But this time, there is an added impetus, the electricity guzzling tech sector, as Siobhan Silk explains.
00:49It's an industrial revolution era power source,
00:53and Donald Trump wants it to power the AI revolution.
00:57He believes coal is what's needed to feed the energy-hungry data centres used by AI platforms,
01:03a demand that's predicted to skyrocket in the near future.
01:08Over the past 25 years, coal-fired plants' share of electricity generation in the U.S.
01:13dropped from 50% to 16%.
01:16In parallel, coal production has been in steady decline.
01:19Trump is determined to reverse those trends, but at what cost?
01:25Most of the coal produced in the U.S. comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal,
01:30which cause huge damage to the immediate environment.
01:33And the extraction is just the first part.
01:36Trump calls it beautiful, clean coal, but that's a huge misnomer.
01:41When burned, coal produces more greenhouse gases than any other fossil fuel
01:45and releases dangerous particulate pollution into the air.
01:50Public health researchers found that pollution from coal-fired plants
01:53killed almost half a million people in the U.S. in the first two decades of this century.
01:59The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that around 40,000 people
02:04currently work in the coal industry, down from 70,000 10 years ago.
02:08Much of that decline happened during the first Trump administration,
02:11though he had promised to revive coal jobs then.
02:14While the Biden administration funded programs to retrain coal industry workers
02:19for the renewable energy sector, Trump has tried to roll back supports for clean energy.
02:25But the renewables industry is growing despite those efforts.
02:29As companies look at the bottom line,
02:32renewable power plants are fast to build
02:34and provide much cheaper energy than fossil fuels.
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