Poor coal – its time has come. What was once an irreplaceable driver of the industrial revolution is now a sad, worn out, and toxic industry that has been surpassed in every category by 21st C clean energy technologies that don’t kill people or destroy our planet as a byproduct. Coal is dying – and while we can honor its historic past, we should all be doing our very best to euthanize it as quickly as possible.
Yet not everyone is on board with this plan.
On Nov 27, 2024, Texas AG Ken Paxton and a coalition of 10 other Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit against investment firms BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, alleging that they “illegally conspired to artificially constrict the market for coal.” According to their suit, these investment firms used their climate-conscious ESG commitments to pressure coal producers to reduce output, and this reduction of output in turn resulted in higher prices for consumers.
The suit is widely recognized as an attempt to intimidate ESG investing, which is founded on the principle that we should take into account the health of a corporation’s environmental (E), social (S), and governmental (G) practices when investing our money. This makes sense – you probably don’t want to invest your 401k in industries that are actively destroying the world into which you will retire. The only problem with ESG investing (from coal’s standpoint), is that their industry is killing people and destroying our planet – and so as coal dies, it is doing everything it can to deceive the public about this basic reality so it can continue to make money.
In light of this, Paxton’s lawsuit has taken the highly optimistic strategy of basing its argument on consumer protection and antitrust laws, both of which are designed to guard citizens against harmful products, whether they be physically harmful or economically harmful (in the form of high prices). According to Paxton and his fellow AGs, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard formed a “syndicate” which colluded to reduce coal production, thereby harming consumers through increased prices. Coal, through this lawsuit, is now fighting for the people!
The irony of this “consumer-protection” argument would be difficult to overstate.
Coal power is linked to heart disease, respiratory illness, and premature death, and causes $13-26 billion in health costs every year in the US. Coal-related PM₂.₅ emissions are more than twice as deadly as those from other sources and have killed approximately 460,000 Americans between 1999–2020 – nearly 21,000 every year. Climate disasters, fueled by the burning of fossil fuels, cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars annually. And from a sheer economic standpoint, wind and solar are consistently less expensive sources of energy than coal – even without the IRA subsidies.
Texas AG Ken Paxton’s argument that an alleged “output restriction” of coal is harming consumers by raising their prices is unlikely to be true in the first place, simply because clean energy is cheaper. Furthermore, production data has shown that some of the related coal companies actually increased output during the alleged conspiracy period. But more importantly, even if his claim of economic harm were true, it would be utterly dwarfed by the amount of harm that burning coal is doing to Americans through premature deaths, poisoned air, increased healthcare costs, and natural disasters accelerated by climate change. If he were actually concerned about protecting consumers’ health and wallets, he would be doing his best to shut down every last coal plant and replace them with wind and solar farms.
So the argument is absurd – and even more so, disingenuous.
But there is another irony at play here – and it works in the other direction. As the coal industry sputters and flails, and presses its GOP lawyers into judo flipping consumer protections into an attack on ESG principles and a defense of coal as a protector of the American people, this process will end up dragging coal firms into litigation. Litigation will in turn make them subject to the legal process of discovery. And in discovery, they will be forced to disclose their internal documents, which many expect to be a veritable treasure trove of damning evidence pointing to intentional disinformation campaigns, shady lobbying strategies, and a crystal-clear awareness for decades about how their product has been killing US citizens while making their CEOs rich. This has happened in the past with Big Tobacco, and climate lawsuits against Exxon and others have revealed similar patterns. We know coal is a dirty liar – we just don’t know how dirty. This fool’s errand by Ken Paxton will make that clear for everyone.
And so, with a poetic justice fit for Hollywood, it is a beautiful irony that as coal dies, it may very well be the industry’s own hair-brained scheme, executed through corrupt AGs like Paxton, that drives the stake through its heart.
Allen Drew is the Northeast Regional Organizer for the Climate Witness Project.
