As he touted President Donald Trump’s latest executive orders propping up the country’s “beautiful clean coal” industry, Senate President Robert Stivers of Manchester said that “the assumption” that fossil fuels contribute to climate change “is subject to debate.”
The debate over anthropogenic climate change is not between climate scientists. The planet’s foremost climate scientists, the U.S. military, its agricultural, meteorological and other research organizations agree that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change — contributing to rising sea levels, melting ice, ocean warming and acidification, changing rainfall patterns and the kinds of extreme weather Kentucky has repeatedly endured over the last decade.
Several prominent Kentuckians attended Trump’s signing last week including Stivers, members of Kentucky’s Congressional delegation, and coal magnate and Republican megadonor Joe Craft.
Stivers told reporters Tuesday that it was his first time visiting the White House, and he was proud to support the orders that directed federal agencies to drop regulations that “discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.” Trump also directed the Energy Department to consider a method for using emergency powers to prevent coal plants from shuttering, and he temporarily waived some air pollution requirements for dozens of plants.
Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. Its byproducts produce air pollution that contributes to premature deaths in Kentucky and around the planet, and water pollution that contaminates the state’s and the country’s water resources.
Coal capacity has dropped precipitously over the last several decades — a trend that continued throughout Trump’s first term in office — as utilities switch to cheaper and cleaner electricity sources like natural gas, wind and solar power.
More companies across the country are scheduled to move away from coal with 23 units lined up to close or convert to natural gas by the end of the year, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. None of those units are located in Kentucky; however, Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities received permission in 2023 to close two of their coal-fired generating units, replacing them with natural gas and solar energy.
Stivers has fought against the replacement of coal energy, attributing it to pressure from government agencies. He said that Trump intends to shift money set aside to encourage the growth of renewable energies to instead prop up utility coal-fired generation.
“[The money] will be shifted to assist the investor-owned and the co-ops to help them restore, refurbish what they have basically been letting run down because they were being pushed that direction,” Stivers said. “Because they were not getting anything except critiques and pressure from the Biden administration to shut them down.”
According to a New York Times analysis, more coal capacity was retired under Trump’s first term than under Biden’s.
Kentucky is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels with coal and natural gas responsible for 69% and 24% respectively of the state’s energy generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. At the same time, Kentucky has dropped from one of the country’s cheapest energy producers to no. 12, falling behind states like North Dakota, Wyoming and Louisiana. All three still use coal power, but also have more diverse mixes that include more nuclear or renewable energies than Kentucky.
A survey of 88,125 climate related studies between 2012 and 2020 found that more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree climate change is indeed caused by human activities, namely greenhouse gas emissions that are largely from the burning of fossil fuels.
Climate change, according to the latest National Climate Assessment, is also causing more extreme weather patterns across the planet including severe floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that humankind has not done enough to address warming, and limited time remains to avoid irreversible impacts to the planet.
Climate change is contributing to Kentucky becoming warmer and wetter. In the past several years, the state has seen several extreme flood events that decimated communities. These are the kinds of severe weather events that climate scientists say Kentuckians can expect as the planet warms.
Stivers questioned that weather patterns have gotten more severe pointing to the Ohio River flood of 1937, after which the Army Corps of Engineers created more than seventy storage reservoirs along the river and the Kentucky Dam project to dramatically reduce flood damage.
The longtime Senate president said that even if he assumes there is a connection, people should want more of their energy production in the U.S.
“Do you want us with some of the strongest regulatory processes doing more fossil fuels than shipping it and allowing our products to be produced in Russia, China and India that have limited or no environmental concerns?” Stiver asked. “I would rather do it here.”
The Kentucky General Assembly has passed laws designed to slow or block the retirement of coal-fired plants that bear resemblance to parts of Trump’s executive orders. Stivers has led some of those efforts as well.
Stivers harkened back to coal towns in explaining what he believed would be the beneficial economic impact of Trump’s orders.
“When these miners would go in, they'd have to get their Pepsi, moon pie and bologna sandwich to put in their mining pail, in their lunch pail. And so you'll see that economic dynamic that more people will have to be the suppliers. So it won't just be miners going back to work. It'll be all the peripheral jobs that will come back,” Stivers said. “That's the hope at the end.”
Despite the specific reference to a shift in funds away from renewables, Stivers denied that it would have a negative influence on the state’s nascent renewable and nuclear industries, saying it would just put more incentives in the hands of fossil fuels.
“The discussion was always about wind and solar being competitive with other types of fossil fuels,” Stivers said. “There weren't the incentives for fossil fuels that there were for the renewables.”
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
