The same day President Donald Trump launched his AI Action Plan, his Energy Secretary Chris Wright pulled federal support for a power project with ties to renewable energy that could help that plan. Not coincidentally, Trump instructed Wright at his AI summit that he must say “clean, beautiful” before any mention of the word “coal” and that the U.S. must compete with China’s construction of new coal-fired plants.

Possibly the only thing more bizarre than Trump’s enforced catch-phrasing is his vision of 21st century robots running on a power technology that hasn’t been cutting-edge since the days of Thomas Edison. Coal has long been a political prop for Trump, but this has taken on greater significance in his second term, with a naked assault on both the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and zero-carbon technologies (nuclear power excepted). When coal isn’t being touted as beautiful or clean, it is pitched as reliable and cheap, and due for a comeback if freed from overbearing rules.

This is a fantasy, and a bleak one at that, not just for the climate but also that AI plan.

You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain coal’s decline in the U.S. It lost 31 percentage points of market share in U.S. power generation between 2005 and 2024, and natural gas picked up four-fifths of that. Why? Gas got cheaper. Five times the cost of coal in 2005, on an energy-equivalent basis, that gap was all but erased by booming shale supply (which Trump also backs). Meanwhile, the cost of building new coal plants, already a multiple of that for gas, went up even as it went down for gas (and renewables). Coal’s........

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