Coal is mostly sticking around in the US because of federal overreach to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance.

Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:

> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:

> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.

https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-...

TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.

New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.

Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.

There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

We could have and should have replaced all coal with nuclear but no, we couldn't do that.

Burning coal is a huge and easy win. Artisinal and small scale gold mining should be high on the list too, even though it's a much harder problem:

https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...

Not with Captain Planet tier cartoon villains in power.

We live in opposite-world where the way it is, is the exact opposite of how it should be