This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel. "I call it beautiful, clean coal," President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. "I tell my people never use the word coal unless you put'beautiful, clean' before it." Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he's been in politics.

Donald Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday aimed at reviving coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel that has long been in decline, and which substantially contributes to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. Environmentalists expressed dismay at the news, saying that Trump was stuck in the past and wanted to make utility customers "pay more for yesterday's energy". The US president is using emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants scheduled for retirement to keep producing electricity. The move, announced at a White House event on Tuesday afternoon, was described by White House officials as being in response to increased US power demand from growth in datacenters, artificial intelligence and electric cars. Trump, standing in front of a group of miners in hard hats, said he would sign an executive order "that slashes unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal".

I appreciated Phillip G. Armour's use of coupled pendulums as an analogy for software project management in his The Business of Software column "The Chaos Machine" (Jan. Chaos is already being exhibited when Armour's machine performs smoothly, in the sense future behavior is inherently unpredictable. What happened when the machine made a hop was not that it "hit a chaos point" but apparently some "resonance disaster" that caused it to exceed the range of operation for which it was built. Moreover, "turbulence" is not an appropriate description in this context, as it describes irregular movement in fluid dynamics. Chaotic behavior does not require three variables.