Zeus: Whistling past the 'beautiful black coal' industry graveyard

When political lies meet market reality

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(David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. His climate columns have appeared in USA Today, The Independent, and New Thinking magazine).

NEW YORK (Callaway Climate Insights) — Anyone who ever poured a dusty batch of charcoal into a Weber grill knows coal is neither beautiful nor clean. Anyone of the more than 80,000 American families who’ve lost loved ones to suffocating black lung in the past 50 years from working in coal mines knows the same.

And anyone who thinks businesses — even dirty energy businesses — are going to pour millions of dollars of investment into building new coal plants just because President Donald Trump calls coal “beautiful and clean” should talk with our blacksmith first.

This week’s flurry of executive orders from the White House designed to restart and expand the coal industry to meet rising energy demand are the latest, and perhaps most outrageous effort yet to try to impose MAGA disinformation on rational markets.