ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 turns to coal to examine business actors in the coal industry that mine the coal and in the utility industry that burn it to generate electricity. While the US continues to have the largest estimated recoverable coal reserves on the planet, demand for coal has been declining largely because the electricity sector, which consumes almost 90 per cent of US coal production, has been substituting coal for cheap gas. In this context, President Obama’s attempts to implement an emissions trading scheme, and later the Clean Power Plan, two initiatives that are directly designed to limit the exploitation of coal, have been fiercely contested by business actors in both the coal and utility industries.
