Has the time come to make coal great again? Maybe.

“Coal is cheap and far less profitable to export than to burn domestically. so, let’s burn it here,” says Steve Milloy, a veteran observer of the energy industry who served on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for the first Trump administration. “It will provide an abundance of affordable and reliable electricity while helping coal communities thrive for the long term.” (RELATED: JOHN STOSSEL: Politicians Always Want To Do More … With Your Money)

The U.S. coal industry has been in a long decline since at least President Barack Obama’s regulatory “war on coal” initiated 15 years ago. At the same time, natural gas became more competitive with coal as a power-plant fuel when new hydrofracturing techniques lowered the price of the former.

In Pennsylvania, a state with prodigious amounts of both fuels, natural gas has all but replaced coal for electric generation. Between 2001 and 2021, gas’ share of power production rose from 2% to 52% as coal’s dropped from 57% to 12%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Last year, Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant shut down under the pressures of regulations and economics after spending nearly $1 billion on pollution controls in the preceding........

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