A few years back, my friend Norm told me that when he was growing up in northern New Mexico in the 1950s and early \u201860s, his family often drove up to the La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado. From there he could see all the way to the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, some 200 miles away.<\/p>\n
His statement saddened me, since in all the time I spent on Four Corners high points, a persistent haze always limited my visibility to maybe 50 or 60 miles, blurring Shiprock\u2019s sharp spires into a fuzzy silhouette. That\u2019s because a fleet of massive coal-fired power plants in the region churned out haze-producing pollutants<\/a>, harming humans and the ecology and blotting out vistas from the San Juans to the Sandias. It seemed as if I\u2019d never get a view as clear as Norm\u2019s.<\/p>\n But over the last decade, the failing economics of coal and clean air regulations shuttered those power plants. That means the air on the Colorado Plateau — when not sullied by the ever-lengthening wildfire season \u2014 has become cleaner as the coal industry faded away.<\/p>\n The shuttered plants include Mojave, Navajo, Nucla, Escalante, San Juan and, most recently, Cholla. The closures certainly sharpened the view of folks all over the region. But more importantly, they kept tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oodles of harmful pollutants (arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide and soot) out of the lungs of nearby residents, many of them on the Navajo Nation.<\/p>\n Yet in defiance of the free market that has boosted renewables, the Trump administration is acting to undo those positive changes and make the air dirty again by throwing multiple lifelines to the flagging coal industry.<\/p>\n It has eviscerated environmental protections limiting mercury and other toxic air emissions<\/a>, ended Obama-and Biden-era freezes on new federal coal leases<\/a>, and rescinded limits on carbon dioxide emissions. The administration has also blocked utilities from shutting down plants that are old, dirty and more costly than other power sources.<\/p>\n Trump purports to do this in the name of \u201cunleashing\u201d coal from regulatory constraints so it can be mined and burned to achieve American \u201cenergy dominance.\u201d Yet it\u2019s unlikely that unleashing the industry will reverse its decline.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that delaying implementation of the mercury rule will enable the Colstrip coal plant in Montana — one of the nation\u2019s dirtiest facilities — to continue operating without expensive new pollution control equipment. Generally, though, utilities such as Xcel Energy, Intermountain Power Agency and Tri-State Generation & Transmission are moving forward with plans to retire their coal plants, namely because the aging facilities are dirty, inefficient, inflexible and, most of all, no longer profitable. They just can\u2019t compete with natural gas, solar, wind, and other, cleaner energy sources.<\/p>\n When signing one of his fossil-fuel-friendly orders, Trump said he would \u201csave\u201d the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, from destruction,\u00a0adding, \u201cWe’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n