Not content to have “won” the FIFA Peace Prize, President Donald Trump now boasts a new honor. Much like the FIFA prize, this one was invented just for him.
Ladies and gents, meet the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal,” Donald J. Trump. The president got this pathetic little title on Wednesday while signing an order requiring the Department of Defense to buy billions of dollars' worth of coal-fired energy.
Nothing like using the full force of government to prop up a dying industry, right? And hey, if it comes with a cool trophy, all the better.
Yes, there was a trophy. (See lead image.) A pro-coal organization, the Washington Coal Club, invented the award, which seems to be the only thing it has done lately.
Their website appears to be dead, and the latest 990 filing available shows the group with a whopping $23,192 in assets, according to ProPublica. However, the group was perhaps more of a powerhouse once upon a time. Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2019 to 2021, was reportedly the group’s president at one time.
The organization even gave out another doofus-y award back in the day. In 2017, it bestowed a “Lifetime Achievement Award” on Robert Murray, a coal company CEO and climate change denier, according to DeSmog, an environmental news and research outlet. Murray’s company, Murray Energy, is associated with the deaths of multiple miners (the company denied responsibility). In 2019, Murray Energy declared bankruptcy. Murray also allegedly sexually harassed employees.
In other words, Trump seems like a pretty worthy successor to Murray’s Lifetime Achievement Award, but the Washington Coal Club apparently couldn’t just give him that one. No, it had to be a special new award for a very special boy.
While the Washington Coal Club may have felt the need to boost Trump’s ego, it isn’t as if Trump needs any encouragement to mandate coal use. He repeatedly tries to sell the country on the dirty energy, despite that it doesn’t seem to want it. For instance, an attempt to throw open public lands for private companies to mine tons of coal failed miserably, netting one bid offering a fraction of a penny per ton. And while utility companies want to decommission their coal plants, the Trump administration has tried to force at least one of them to keep its plant open, even though that costs consumers more.
Maybe if we all embrace Coalie, the administration’s cute little coal mascot, we’ll all come around.
It’s fitting that Trump is falling all over himself to accept an award as champion of something that doesn’t really exist. Clean coal is not a thing. It’s just coal that is refined with fun chemicals like calcium bromide, a carcinogen that is especially bad when it leeches into the water supply, as it reportedly did in North Carolina. Nor does this coal burn any cleaner or meaningfully reduce emissions.
Oh well, given that the government is abandoning the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health, coal companies probably don’t even need to engage in the “clean” charade any longer.
But Trump will always be a champion, and no one can take that fake award away from him.
Lisa Needham February 13, 2026 at 12:30AM From Daily Kos
0 Comments