This blog post was motivated by this recent op-ed in the Denver Post by the esteemed Jonathan Thompson (whose articles I’ve read for years in High Country News), “Trump gives coal a boost, guts renewables and will return haze to the Four Corners” My apologies if you hit a paywall with that link — but I’ll give you the gist here.

Also I’ll get to flying pigs by the end of this…and, yes, that does have something to do with the Trump administration.

What Thompson describes in his piece is how achingly clear the air used to be in the southwest — so clear that back in the 1950’s, if you were in the La Plata mountains in southwest Colorado, which are north of Durango, you could see the Sandia Mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico — about 200 miles away.

No longer: due to the construction of a “fleet” (a dozen?) of massive coal burning plants throughout the Southwest in the 1950s and 60s, that clarity  blurred to limiting such vistas to just 50 or 60 miles; and haze was the least of the environmental harm, which included increased respiratory disease, cancer and shortened lifespans. The size of these plants was massive, since they were located far from urban areas, such as this shot of the Navajo Station above Lake Powell (those smokestacks are over 700 feet tall):

After they were constructed, there was growing awareness, and protest, against the increasing haze and air pollution that the plants caused over the following years. Though it took decades for the evidence to accumulate, be gathered, filed in legal cases, and work through the courts, a settlement was finally reached in 2015, in one of the largest settlements against coal plants in history, the Four Corners Power Plant Clean Air Act Settlement. In all, six of these highly polluting, smoke belching behemoths of power plants have been closed since that time. And the air quality has improved significantly as a result.

I was able to find this dramatic video footage of the Navajo station coming down, which was quite iconic: Drone video captures the demolition of the smokestacks at the Navajo Generating Station. This was likely something many of local Navajo residents, on whose land it was built, never thought they’d see in their lifetime.

This video is more likely what you would have seen had you been there in person: Massive coal stacks demolished that long towered over Lake Powell In this video, there are Navajo interviewed who worked in the coal mines or at the power plant most of their lives; but they acknowledge the need to move on, that renewable energy is the future.

Not so with this Trump administration; it is seeking to promote the obsolete coal industry to continue to generate electricity. Even though all the major power utilities in the country are uniformly moving away from coal, this administration thinks it can stop such market forces with a presidential order — as if markets ever obeyed presidents. Nonetheless, the administration is using this as an excuse to release the electric power companies that still have coal plants from environmental regulations meant to improve our environmental quality; and so a handful of coal-burning power plants are going to be allowed to increase the polluting of their surrounding environment — as if that is really going to amount to a hill of beans in the overall scheme of things. Trump’s administrators making these decisions will go down in history as badly misguided, utterly uniformed sycophants who are only making climate change worse, forcing bad investments on industry, and lengthening the time it is going to take to stabilize the global climate.

I think we are going to see pigs starting to sprout wings and fly before we see the coal industry taking off again. But will the emperor see that he has no clothes and change his mind? I doubt it.