Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he has been keeping his promises. He promised to revive the fossil fuel industry and he has been doing his best—as he sees it—to do just that. More acreage open for lease sales for oil and gas exploration, a roll-back of environmental regulation to stimulate a revival in coal, and the import tariffs on solar panels are a few of the steps the President has taken in this direction. And yet, coal plants are getting retired at a faster pace than before. How come? The problem of coal is a very basic market forces problem. Coal has simply lost its competitiveness against natural gas and increasingly cheaper solar and wind. No amount of pro-coal legislation can fix that—at least not without doing some major damage to the gas and renewables industries, which is hardly something Washington wants. Forbes’ Jeff McMahon reports […]