Trumpist agencies keep getting weirder and weirder
On X—the platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who left the
Trump administration earlier this year—the department shared an image of coal
with the message, "She's an icon. She's a legend. And she is the
moment."
The audio of
television host Wendy Williams saying that, while speaking about rapper Lil'
Kim, often has been repurposed by social media users. However, the DOE's use of
the phrase to glamorize coal sparked swift and intense backlash.
Much of the response came on X, with critics calling the
post "some weird shit" and "literally
unhinged."
"POV: It's 1885 and you work for the Department of
Energy," wrote Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served on the Council of
Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.
Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy
and Natural Resources replied:
"She is inefficient. She is dirtier air. She is higher energy bills."
Multiple X users pointed
to coal workers' pneumoconiosis, a condition that occurs when coal
dust is inhaled—including California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's press
office, which wrote, "She's black lung."
The national Democratic Party account said,
"In April, Trump cut a program that gave free black lung screenings to
coal miners."
After U.S. District Judge Irene Berger—appointed by former President Barack Obama in West Virginia—issued a preliminary injunction against firings at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, nearly 200 workers who screen coal miners for black lung were reinstated.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken
various steps to attack the climate and benefit the fossil
fuel industry, such as picking fracking CEO Chris Wright to lead DOE, signing coal-friendly executive orders in April and
issuing proclamations that provide what the White House called "regulatory
relief" for a range of facilities, including coal plants, earlier this
month.
"Hard to fathom this coming from the DOE if there were
any sane, reasonable, rational, or thoughtful government in control,"
Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator, said of
the department's pro-coal X post. "The Trump administration wants us all
choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from
the luxury class can be ever more wealthy. Coal is not the moment. Coal is not
going to meet U.S. energy needs. Coal is not the way forward."
Climate and clean energy investor Ramez Naam wrote,
"She is the past," and shared the graph below, which features data
from the U.S. Energy Information Administration about coal consumption since
1960.
Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at Canada's University of Ottawa studying contentious climate debates, quipped, "Just the U.S. Department of Energy shilling for one of the most destructive industries known to humanity cool cool cool."
In the early 1900s, coal mining in the United States often
killed more than 2,000 workers per year, according
to the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health
Administration. Over the past decade, it has killed roughly 10 people annually.
It's not just coal miners who are at risk. Research
published in the journal Science two years ago found that "from 1999-2020, approximately 460,000
deaths in the Medicare population were attributable to coal
electricity-generating emissions."
Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate
Silence, said Thursday: "The fact that they're coding coal
as female is right in line with the fact that Trump is a rapist. They take
everything they want, they think the planet is like a woman they can just
exploit, and fuck whomever they hurt in the process."
Several women have accused the president of sexual assault,
including journalist E. Jean Carroll, who
said he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Although Trump has denied the allegations, in 2023, a New York City jury found him
civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
