US ELECTIONS: Race for presidency has no time for old 'King Coal'

"King Coal," once dominant in American energy politics, has nearly vanished as a national political force in 2024.

As climate change became a mainstream concern and consumers increasingly embraced coal's alternatives, the "war on coal" narrative faded from the national stage and has scarcely been mentioned by US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. A fight to keep existing coal plants continues, but miners are spending less money to influence US energy policy and deploying less heated political rhetoric.

The days of coal-fueled political powerhouses such as former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.), swing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W. Va.) and coal producer firebrand Bob Murray holding the media's attention have waned. Where once candidates for national office had to take a position on coal's role in the energy mix, the issue is vanishing alongside its most bombastic advocates.

"In all ways, coal's role has changed significantly. As a flash point policy issue, I think it's old news or perceived to be old news by the general public that the market trends all point in one direction," said Robert Godby, a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. "Those companies have just, in the past eight years, become a lot more careful and certainly, to some degree, have been a lot less politically outspoken."

Coal's ramp up, down in political influence

In 1990, coal accounted for 52% of total electricity generation in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The black rock fueled the backbone of the US power grid, and producers and plant owners could lean on politicians with dire warnings of blackouts and lost jobs in their communities. In 2024, experts see a clear path to little to no coal on the grid within the next few decades. Coal power provided 15% of US electricity in 2023, and that is projected to fall to 6.4% by 2035, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence Power Forecast data released in early October.

US coal production peaked at 1.17 billion short tons in 2008, the year President Barack Obama was elected, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Coal miners recoiled at Obama's plans for addressing climate change, including his idea that coal-fired power plants would become bankrupt as they "are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

Obama's backing of the increasingly influential environmental movement alarmed coal miners and coal power plant operators that entered the political arena with renewed ferocity. Murray, the former CEO and founder of Murray Energy Corp. who died in 2020, routinely hammered Obama.

"His legacy will be that of the nation's greatest destroyer, and he certainly is the greatest enemy that I, personally, and my family and employees, have ever had," Murray said in prepared remarks to the Ohio County, West Virginia, Republican Party in 2015.

As Obama advanced policy aimed at closing coal plants, coal advocates only became more vociferous. Political donations linked to the coal industry peaked at $23.5 million in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2012, according to OpenSecrets' analysis of US Federal Election Commission data.

Shifting political winds

Coal lost salience, too, as its backers became dedicated Republicans, staunchly opposed to Democrats who supported policies aiming to address climate change. The coal state of West Virginia had been a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War. Byrd held a US Senate seat representing West Virginia for 51 years, becoming a powerful appropriator famous for steering federal funds into the state. But even Byrd shocked his constituents with a 2009 statement on coal suggesting that climate policy was inevitable.

"Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry," Byrd wrote in late 2009. "West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. One thing is clear. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose."

Byrd's fellow West Virginians rejected his advice and backed Republicans, who promised to save their most important industry. Coal-producing states such as Kentucky and Wyoming have become Republican redoubts. In 2024, 97.6% of political donations toward the coal industry went to Republican candidates.

Fracking revolution

While Byrd was making those observations, energy companies began unlocking massive US natural gas reserves through hydraulic fracturing, creating a cleaner and cheaper alternative to black rock.

Cheap natural gas, plus new environmental regulations, nudged utilities to ditch coal power for natural gas power plants, creating the conditions that fueled claims of a "war on coal," said Charles Kolstad, a senior fellow at Stanford University and energy and environmental economist.

"It had a real big impact on some of these coal mining towns," Kolstad said. "All those things together made coal probably a pretty salient issue for Trump to take up in 2016."

With 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton promising to continue the climate policies of her predecessor, coal country came in on the side of Republican Trump.

Murray supported Trump early, calling him the "horse to ride." The coal executive said he was one of Trump's "energy guys" and that he had the president's ear on pro-coal policies.

"With his courage, intelligence, caring and passion, Donald Trump will be the best president of our lifetimes," Murray said in 2016.

But by 2016, coal's presence in the energy grid had already begun to decline, as did the commodity's involvement in politics. Political donations from the industry fell to $18.7 million in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2016, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Despite coal country supporting Trump's promises to revive the industry, he did not deliver. Between 2016, the year before Trump was inaugurated, and the end of 2020, coal production and employment decreased by 26.5% and 18.2%, respectively.

"If you've got arguably the most important, most powerful person in the world and they can't reverse coal's decline, then who really could?" Godby asked. "It's just gone from less of a lightning rod issue to one that people just kind of accept."

No coal on the trail

In the 2024 campaign, neither Harris nor Trump has made much mention of the coal industry.

"I think there's a couple of reasons," Godby said. "The obvious one is just coal is far less important. I think the other thing, too, is that people have just become accustomed to the fact that coal is going to decline."

While coal executives have remained politically active — Alliance Resource Partners LP President and CEO Joseph Craft co-hosted a $25,000-per-couple dinner for Trump's campaign in May — they have been significantly less visible than in past election cycles. Political donations from the coal industry dropped to $10.7 million in 2020 in inflation-adjusted dollars, down 42.7% from the 2016 campaign. In 2024, just $7.9 million has been spent as of September, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission data.

Trump, who once promised to revive "beautiful, clean coal' in 2016, is now more likely to mention gas and oil drilling in his speeches. Democrats have avoided discussing coal, focusing instead on clean energy victories such as the Inflation Reduction Act. Without comments from Harris or Biden similar to Obama saying coal plants would go "bankrupt" or Clinton's suggestion that a lot of coal miners and coal companies would go "out of business," Republicans also have little red meat from the coal sector this cycle.

In addition, some of coal's staunchest political supporters will not be around to cheer on the industry in the coming year.

Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, famously shot a mock copy of his party's energy bill in his 2010 US Senate campaign, vowing to "take dead aim at cap-and-trade." Manchin will step down this year, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a long-time coal advocate, is retiring this year.

The leading candidate for Manchin's seat is West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who made some of his fortune from his coal businesses. Justice also owns other assets in agriculture and tourism. Though typically pro-coal and more popular with the industry since switching to the Republican ticket, the West Virginia Coal Association sided against Justice's initial gubernatorial run. The industry group has since endorsed Justice for his current Senate bid.

Most states where coal mining holds the most weight are either not in play this cycle, hold relatively few electoral votes or tend to be swayed by issues other than coal.

"I think if you take a look at where most of the coal in the US is produced, those are pretty solidly red states," Randall Atkins, chairman and CEO of metallurgical coal producer Ramaco Resources Inc., told Commodity Insights. "I don't think either side is using a lot of their time to try to convince voters in those states which way to go."

Coal industry's retort: Reliability

Despite fading from the national stage, the stakes remain high for the coal sector.

The outcome of the election could affect the pace of federal approvals for coal mine expansions and have an impact on a proposal to stop leasing federal property in the Powder River Basin, the nation's most productive coal region. Electricity generators are also trying to pause an EPA rule issued in April by the Environmental Protection Agency that requires existing coal-fired power plants and new gas plants to capture at least 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032.

Coal supporters argue it should remain a political priority.

"The nation's grid reliability regulators, grid operators and utilities are all warning of power supply shortages and are pointing directly to federal regulatory policy targeting the existing coal fleet as a key concern," said Conor Bernstein, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.

Coal producers say they are not worried about the dearth of coal-supporting speeches.

"We're not concerned about that at all," Chris Hamilton, president and CEO of the West Virginia Coal Association, said in an interview. "Based on the discussions we've had with [Trump and his staff], we think that coal is right there on the forefront of his energy policy."

Instead of public campaigns centered on a cultural war, coal advocacy now focuses on utilities lobbying state authorities to slow the clean energy transition, said Bruce Nilles, executive director of Climate Imperative and an early leader within the Sierra Club's highly influential Beyond Coal campaign. Several utilities have delayed plans to close coal-fired power plants in recent months.

"Actually getting these coal plants retired has been thwarted by a pretty savvy effort to confuse policymakers that somehow we have this crazy demand growth, and we can't possibly meet it with clean energy," Nilles said. "I think [the coal sector is] not yet impotent — they've been doing a bang-up job in a good number of states creating this sense of a crisis that's resulting in where we are today."