The President Put $700 Million Behind Clean, Beautiful Coal.

In thirty years on the casino floor I heard a lot of men call things beautiful. The slot that was about to pay. The dealer’s bust card. The cocktail waitress who was, in fact, married. Beautiful was the word a man used when he wanted something to be true.

This week the President stood up and called coal beautiful. And clean. Clean, beautiful coal, he said, like he was reading off a brochure for a product that does not exist.

The pitch.

Here is the actual line, and I am quoting him. He said the country was taking historic action “with the power of clean, beautiful coal.” Then he put seven hundred million dollars behind it. Money for thirteen old plants, money for two new ones, money to restart one in Maryland that somebody had the good sense to switch off.

Coal is a lot of things. We have more of it than anybody. It burns hot, it is cheap, and it is sitting right there in the ground. All true. The clean part is the part the experts keep raising their hands about, because coal is about the dirtiest way we know to boil water, and calling it clean does not change what comes out of the stack.

The Oakland part.

Here is the detail that made me put my coffee down. Seventy-five million of that money is to build a terminal to ship coal out of Oakland, California. Oakland. A city that spent years in court fighting to keep coal off its own waterfront. He is using emergency wartime powers, the kind you save for a real national crisis, to move coal through a town that does not want it near the dock.

That is not an energy plan. That is a man buying the exact thing the neighborhood built a fence to keep out, then hauling it in through the front gate, because he can.

The brochure.

The Energy Department put out a fact sheet on all of this. You want to know what they titled it? “Unleashing Beautiful, Clean Coal.” They typed that. On purpose. Capital letters, government website.

I sold a lot of things in my life that were neither beautiful nor clean. The trick was you never said both words out loud. You let the customer fill that part in. The second you say it yourself, in writing, on the letterhead, everybody in the room knows exactly what you are selling.