The Trump Effect.
It was only a matter of time... The Chinese have built hundreds of new coal fired power plants in the past few years. They have had a new coal fired plant come on line every seven to ten days for years now. Japan and other Asian countries are also building a lot of new plants.
We have over 540 billion short tons of coal in known reserves in the United States, the actual amount is most likely higher. We currently use slightly more than 900 million short tons of coal per year to generate over 40% of our electricity consumption in the US. This is highly politicized so accurate figures are getting more and more questionable. This translates to well over 500 years worth of supply at current rates of consumption.
Coal is the most abundant reserve of energy that we have in this country. Attacks on coal are really thinly veiled attacks on the US energy sector and our ability to be energy self sufficient.