Renewable wind and solar energy, along with a booming natural gas industry, continue to win the battle over coal in Texas.
As The Huntsville Tribune reports, last year Texas lost 455 coal-mining jobs, more than any other state. And the state’s biggest power supplier, Luminant, announced that it would be shuttering two massive coal-fired plants this year.
All of this comes despite President Trump’s avowal in his State of the Union address that his administration has “ended the war on beautiful, clean coal.”
Chrissy Mann, spokeswoman for the Sierra Club in Texas, lambasted the President’s promise.
“I find it very frustrating and very disingenuous to talk about a long-term future for coal,” she said. “There’s no such thing as clean coal, from the digging it up and burning it to breathing it to eating it."
To underscore the state’s decreasing reliance on coal, the North Texas city of Denton recently passed a resolution to operate completely on renewable energy by 2020.