The good, the bad and the ugly in Trump's coal plans

While wealthy Western countries have been weaning themselves off coal for the last two decades, Donald Trump is now trying to take the US in the opposite direction.

The president is issuing further orders to start digging and burning more of what he calls "beautiful, clean coal". "All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened, if they're modern enough, (or) they'll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built," he said on Tuesday.

The good Why? The "good" thing about coal is that it is reliable and abundant. In some places it's cheap, and it still provides just over a third of global electricity.

The US has masses of it. Supporters say its existing coal plants only provide power to the grid about 40% of the time, which could easily be boosted by slashing regulation - something which he has already started.

Read more: The major coal producer that wants to leave it in the ground The bad But coal is a disaster for the climate - releasing more planet-heating carbon dioxide than oil and gas, and plenty of sooty air pollution. Hence it's been in decline in richer, Western countries (including the US) since around 2008 - helped by plummeting costs of clean power.

But fast forward around three years, and the world's appetite for electricity has become bigger than expected. In the US, electricity demand, after plateauing for years, is now rising at speed.

It has been driven not just by energy-hungry AI data centres, which tend to grab the headlines, but things like cloud computing, electric vehicles and a revitalised industrial sector. Like the UK, the US wants to lure AI companies to build there to bolster economic growth, and to compete with China.

Mr Trump sees coal as a cheap way to power all these things. It's a case of "if China can have it, why can't we?" - or at least that's what he says on social media.

China has indeed carried on building scores of new coal power plants (though it is also building jaw-dropping amounts of solar and wind power). But "just because they can have lots of coal and lots of renewables in China, doesn't mean that you can do the same in the US.