Can the War on Coal Still Be Won?

 

 

 

By Michael Grunwald

 

December 1, 2025 - Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal.

 

I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. In the Politico Magazine article I subsequently wrote, I called the effort “the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement.” Its litigators and organizers had quietly helped retire one-third of America’s coal fleet in five years — 190 plants in all, about one every 10 days — driving some of the first significant emissions reductions on Earth.

 

The main point of “Inside the War on Coal,” and the key insight of the campaign, was that coal power, historically dirty but cheap, was no longer cheap. In fact, merely operating most existing coal plants had become more expensive than building new clean wind and solar farms as well as less-dirty natural gas plants. That’s why the Sierra Club was waging its war alongside unlikely business allies in obscure utility commission hearings, making the case that less coal would mean lower electricity bills. That’s why Beyond Coal attorneys like Kristin Henry, whose bio identified her as “one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” kept getting utility executives to admit under oath that coal was gouging their ratepayers. That’s why the billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg, who had always seen the Sierra Club as a group of shrill anti-capitalist radicals, agreed to finance its coal campaign, although he insisted on a businesslike, analytical approach. 

 

The article went viral, presumably because of its unexpected blast of good climate news. The war on coal’s successes had enabled President Barack Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, which had enabled the world to commit to even deeper reductions in the Paris climate accord. Humanity was still addicted to oil, but killing coal looked like a kind of gateway drug rehab.

 

“For the next decade,” I wrote, “our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff.”

 

Now, a decade later, President Donald Trump has declared war on the war on coal — or, as he insists everyone in his administration call it, “clean, beautiful coal.” So it seems like a good time to see how things are going on the battlefield.

 

The short summary is that Beyond Coal is still winning, and America is continuing to reduce its reliance on the black stuff. But Trump and the artificial-intelligence boom are complicating the war on coal’s endgame.

 

The overall trajectory has been remarkable. Coal now generates about one-seventh of U.S. electricity, down from one-half in 2010; solar and wind, little more than rounding errors when the campaign began, currently produce more power than coal and employ far more American workers. Utilities have retired or committed to retire 390 coal plants, leaving less than a third of the original fleet in operation. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down by about 20% from 2005 levels — not quite Obama’s goal, but not too shabby — largely because emissions from electricity generation are down by about 40%. Beyond Coal has helped shutter all but one of the 25 plants it initially declared the most dangerous to local communities, and says the retirements have prevented over 1 million asthma attacks and 60,000 premature deaths. California and New England just went coal-free. While the larger Sierra Club has faced some rough internal and external criticism for straying from its core environmental mission, Beyond Coal is still quietly plugging away and kicking ass.

 

 

 

And yet. Trump is on a mission to prop up his coal industry pals, exempting polluting plants from environmental regulations, pouring hundreds of millions of tax dollars into retrofitting them, and opening up millions of acres of federal land to new mining leases while reducing federal royalties from mining companies. Trump’s Department of Energy has even ordered an obsolete Michigan plant that was scheduled for retirement to remain open and is preparing to order other coal plants to do the same. Trump is also blocking new wind and solar just as the AI frenzy is upending expectations of mostly stagnant electricity demand. So some utilities that intended to replace old coal plants with new renewables are rethinking those plans — and Beyond Coal is now working as hard to get them to say yes to clean power as it has to get them to say no to coal.

 

Unlike gasoline-powered cars, which face competition from electric vehicles but still dominate the global automotive fleet, or natural gas, which is on the upswing, coal is in terminal decline in America. The average U.S. plant is 45 years old. The last new one came online 12 years ago — and even that youngish plant just broke down and had to suspend operations until 2027. With electricity prices around the country rising much faster than inflation, the affordability case for wind and solar has never been stronger, especially since the batteries that can store that clean energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining have never been cheaper.

 

But after 15 years in the trenches of the war on coal, Henry isn’t sure the final victory is as imminent as she once hoped, because proving that coal no longer makes sense is easier than making it go away. Sure, it’s a dinosaur, but dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years.

 

“We win on the law. We win on the economics,” she told me recently. “But sometimes we lose on the politics.”

 

The pivotal battle in my 2015 war-on-coal story was “a dry hearing in a drab courtroom in Oklahoma City,” where Henry cross-examined a hapless Oklahoma Gas & Electric executive about the utility’s request for the largest rate increase in state history to upgrade a wildly inefficient coal plant. She got the executive to admit that the coal he was importing from Wyoming already cost more per kilowatt-hour than the Oklahoma wind that came sweeping down the plains — and that in-state competitors as well as Florida and New Mexico utilities were already buying that Oklahoma wind for less.

 

Henry’s best Perry Mason moment came while she was dismantling the assumptions the utility had used to justify burning more coal. She pointed out that even though the Obama administration was finalizing four new coal regulations that very year, OG&E’s model had assumed there would be no new coal regulations for decades. When the executive hemmed and hawed, Henry pinned him down: ?“Isn’t it true you’re assuming zero over the next 30 years?” she asked.

 

The executive paused for a few seconds, then confessed: “That’s right.”

 

Henry didn’t ask a single question about coal’s impact on the climate, or even on public health. She just argued about electricity rates, which was why lawyers representing Walmart, the state’s hospitals, and a coalition of industrial users that included a factory owned by Koch Industries all echoed her arguments. Beyond Coal’s lawyers are “not burning bras. They’re fighting dollar for dollar,” an attorney for the hospitals told me. “They’ve become masters at bringing financial arguments to environmental questions.” Sure enough, later in 2015 the state’s rate-setting commission rejected OG&E’s costly plan to upgrade the coal plant.

 

But that did not turn out to be the end of the saga.

 

Oklahoma’s then–Attorney General Scott Pruitt — a Republican fossil-fuel booster who would go on to lead the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first term — appealed the ruling, even though he was supposed to be advocating for lower rates for Oklahoma residents. Under intense pressure, the all-Republican commission reversed its decision. So Henry appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and in 2018, she won the case. But it didn’t matter, because OG&E went ahead with the coal upgrades, and the commission eventually approved massive rate increases to pay for them.

 

It’s not fun to spend years on a case, win on the merits, then lose anyway.

 

“That’s just reality,” Henry said. “You still have to keep fighting.”

 

In Ohio, the utility FirstEnergy bribed legislators to pass a bill forcing customers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars propping up two aging coal plants — and even after the scandal erupted in 2020, the subsidies continued until this summer. Now Trump is threatening to prevent any coal plants from retiring; his order invoking an imaginary “energy emergency” to keep that clunky Michigan plant in operation is costing ratepayers millions of dollars per day. His energy secretary, Christopher Wright, recently complained that coal is “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, and New York City.” 

 

The chardonnay set isn’t what’s throttling coal generation in fossil-fuel-friendly Republican states like Utah and Texas. It’s math. The economics of coal plants have continued to deteriorate as they’ve gotten older and creakier. A Sierra Club report on the Oklahoma facility that OG&E kept afloat found it brought in $1.2 billion less revenue over five years than the utility had predicted, because it was so often either down for repairs or unable to produce competitively priced power. The Trump administration just held the largest coal-lease auction on federal land in more than a decade, but had to postpone it after receiving only one bid for less than one cent per ton. The last similar lease sold for more than a dollar per ton.

 

Meanwhile, the costs of wind, solar, and batteries have continued to plunge; they made up 94% of the U.S. grid’s new capacity in 2024. They now generate more than a quarter of the electricity in California — and a third in Texas. And battery storage is expanding even faster, growing by two-thirds in 2024.

 

 

 

Still, Beyond Coal’s job keeps getting harder. That’s partly because the most egregiously indefensible coal plants are already shuttered, partly because the Trump EPA does not seem to care whether the remaining plants comply with environmental laws, and partly because Trump’s brazen war on renewables has slashed subsidies for existing wind and solar farms while making it much harder to develop new ones. There’s also a less political reason: It suddenly looks like America might need a lot more electricity.

 

The Sierra Club’s war on coal began in the early 2000s, after a White House energy task force led by former Vice President Dick Cheney called for the construction of 200 new coal plants. That would have been a climate disaster, locking the grid into decades of dependence on the dirtiest fossil fuel, so the club’s leaders mobilized volunteers and lawyers to fight the proposed projects all over the country.

 

They managed to stop almost all of them, but that feat wasn’t just a triumph of passion and grit. It also turned out no one needed that many new plants of any kind. After the financial crisis of 2008, utilities began scaling back their projections for future electricity demand and struggled to justify a building binge. That’s when the club shifted its focus from blocking new coal plants to shuttering old ones, and Bloomberg cut the organization a $50 million check to launch Beyond Coal as a formal campaign.

 

The combination of coal getting expensive and power demand remaining flat gave the campaign a huge boost as it targeted the least efficient plants. The club’s ultimate goal was a fossil-free grid, but back then it was laser-focused on killing coal. In Oklahoma, Henry did not object to OG&E’s proposal to convert one of its aging coal boilers to natural gas, and I sat in on a closed-door strategy meeting between Henry and a gas-industry group that shared most of her objectives in the case. At the time, the Sierra Club was under fire for accepting gas-industry donations.

 

Today, Beyond Coal is fighting the buildout of gas as well as coal, but the AI frenzy has changed the context, now that American utilities have proposed a total of 200 new gas plants to meet the surge in demand they expect from new data centers. Many experts estimate that AI will increase power demand as much as 10% nationally, but the Sierra Club has calculated that the various utility proposals would increase power capacity by more than 100%.

 

“It’s a lot like the coal situation 20 years ago, with a real threat of digging the hole even deeper with new fossil infrastructure,” said Holly Bender, who oversees Beyond Coal as the club’s chief program officer. “We’ve got to be even clearer about what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against.”

 

Meanwhile, global coal generation hit a record high last year, even though it continued to decline as a share of electricity. Worldwide the vast majority of new electric capacity came from wind and solar, but that wasn’t enough to meet ballooning demand. So the race is on: The world needs more juice, and unless we can build out an extraordinary amount of clean stuff, we’ll keep burning the dirty stuff.  

 

Before the AI boom, when Laurie Williams was a frontline attorney with Beyond Coal, she helped pressure Xcel Energy to commit to retire all its Minnesota coal plants by 2030. Now she’s the head of Beyond Coal, and she was appalled in 2023 when Xcel Energy, which the Sierra Club had ranked the nation’s most responsible utility, proposed to meet soaring demand from AI by building out nearly as much new gas as wind, and hardly any new solar or storage. But with gas prices spiking and gas plants taking much longer than renewable plants to get up and running, her team eventually worked with Minnesota regulators to get Xcel to delay all but one small gas plant, while committing to twice as much wind, three times as much storage, and five times as much solar as its initial plan.

 

“We maximized clean energy, and we saved customers $1.5 billion,” Williams told me. “We’re facing serious headwinds these days, even with the best utilities, even in progressive states. But we know how to win these fights.”

 

The Sierra Club still has NIMBY elements, and its local chapters sometimes care more about protecting turtles than expanding renewables, but it supported the controversial Grain Belt Express transmission line that would have distributed wind to Midwestern cities before Trump and Republican senators killed it. Beyond Coal is now as focused on the beyond part as it is on the coal part, because utilities are going to need more capacity, even if they’re exaggerating how much, and it really matters whether that capacity is zero-emissions.

 

So Beyond Coal is sticking to its affordability message, at a moment when Democratic candidates around the country just won big by talking about rising costs, especially rising utility bills. The campaign is trying to remind Americans that Trump’s fossil-fueled war on wind and solar makes power more expensive, even though that war also makes existing coal (as well as new gas) marginally more competitive. It’s continuing to challenge outdated industry talking points portraying coal as what keeps the lights on — the aging fleet is increasingly unreliable — and renewables as a woke green scam. You can still find its lawyers at rate-setting commission meetings, arguing the facts and the law and the math.

 

These days, though, facts and law and math will only go so far. The war on coal is just one theater in the larger political culture war, and public opinion is just one weapon; most people want cheap and clean power, but it’s not yet clear whether voters in red states will punish politicians and utilities that keep them from getting it. It now seems unlikely that Beyond Coal will achieve its goal of ending U.S. coal by 2030. Closing the last 140 plants might be even harder than closing the first 390.

 

But of course this stuff is hard. If it were easy, it would’ve been done already. A key lesson of the Beyond Coal campaign is that the energy transition isn’t going to happen on its own. People have to do the work to make it happen.

 

“It’s a lot of Whac-A-Mole,” Henry said. “We stop them over here; they try to come back over there. But we’ll keep showing up. We’re built for this.”

Michael Grunwald is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist who was a staff writer for The Washington Post, Time magazine, and Politico Magazine. His most recent book is "We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate."