President Donald Trump came into office promising to reverse the long decline of coal. Now he’s taking action with a plan to pour money into coal-burning plants and open federal lands to mining. But can coal compete with the ascendancy of clean energy technologies?

Coal use has been “displaced in many cases by cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power” over the last two decades, said The New York Times . But “growing interest in artificial intelligence and data centers” has spurred a new surge in electricity demand that is keeping coal-burning plants open past their scheduled closure dates. The Trump administration is augmenting that by designating $625 million in funding to keep plants in operation, opening 13 million acres of land to mining and repealing “dozens of r

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