The Trump administration has introduced "Coalie," an anthropomorphic coal mascot, as part of a campaign to rebrand and revitalize the American coal industry—a move climate advocates describe as both absurd and deeply troubling.
According to reporting from The Guardian, the mascot appears in promotional materials aimed at normalizing coal use and countering what administration officials characterize as "unfair stigmatization" of the fossil fuel. The character features prominently in materials distributed to schools and communities in coal-producing regions.
The mascot strategy represents more than marketing gimmickry—it signals a deliberate cultural campaign to rehabilitate coal's public image at precisely the moment when climate science demands rapid fossil fuel phaseout. Coal combustion remains the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions globally and the primary driver of air pollution-related deaths, killing an estimated four million people annually through respiratory disease and other health impacts.
"This would be comical if the stakes weren't so devastating," says Michael Rodriguez, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA. "They're creating a friendly mascot for the dirtiest energy source on the planet, something that's literally cooking the atmosphere and killing people through air pollution. It's propaganda aimed at the next generation."
The coal revival effort extends far beyond mascots. The administration has rolled back power plant emissions standards, accelerated federal coal lease approvals on public lands, and proposed subsidies for coal-fired electricity generation. Officials frame these policies as supporting energy independence and protecting jobs in regions economically dependent on coal mining.
Yet the economic argument increasingly conflicts with market realities. Renewable energy now costs less than coal in most markets, and utilities continue retiring coal plants for economic rather than regulatory reasons. Even in states with strong coal advocacy, solar and wind installations are expanding faster than coal capacity, driven by dramatic cost declines and corporate clean energy commitments.
The mascot campaign targets children and families in coal country, regions where economic anxiety and cultural identity intertwine with the fossil fuel industry. Education materials featuring "Coalie" emphasize coal's historical role powering American industrialization while downplaying or omitting climate and health impacts.
Dr. Leah Santos, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, describes the strategy as "dangerous misdirection. Children living near coal plants and along transportation routes face elevated asthma rates, developmental impacts, and long-term health risks. Marketing coal to kids is like marketing cigarettes—it's normalizing something that fundamentally harms them."
Environmental justice advocates emphasize that coal's impacts fall disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color, who live nearer to coal plants, mines, and ash disposal sites. The mascot campaign, they argue, obscures these inequities while deflecting attention from just transition policies that could support coal workers and communities in shifting to clean energy employment.
International climate negotiators have reacted with dismay. The European Union's climate envoy characterized the campaign as "out of step with where the world is heading," noting that most developed economies have set coal phaseout dates and are accelerating closures ahead of schedule.
In climate policy, as across environmental challenges, urgency must meet solutions—science demands action, but despair achieves nothing. The coal mascot represents the inverse: denial substituting for action, branding replacing substance, and cultural nostalgia overriding physical reality. The question is whether such campaigns can meaningfully slow the transition already underway, or whether they represent last gasps of an industry whose decline is determined by economics as much as environmental policy.
Coal employment in the United States has fallen 70 percent since 1985, not primarily from regulation but from mechanization and competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables. No mascot can reverse that trend, though it may delay necessary support for affected workers and regions. Climate advocates argue that the resources devoted to coal promotion would be better spent on worker retraining, economic diversification, and clean energy infrastructure in coal-dependent areas—investments that acknowledge reality rather than marketing around it.
