When you practice the Trump management’s social media posts, you may spot its new mascot: a caricature lump of coal with large eyes and babylike options. “Coalie” sparked a backlash virtually once Inside Secretary Doug Burgum debuted it for the Workplace of Floor Mining and Reclamation Enforcement in early 2026.
Coalie’s design attracts on one of those Eastern anime referred to as Kawaii, a phrase which means “cute” or “adorable.” It’s the newest within the White Area’s efforts to cross off coal as risk free, regardless of the well-established environmental and human well being harms of mining and burning the fossil gasoline.
As a pupil of American literature and tradition, I write about media portrayals of coal, starting within the Nineteenth century with its upward thrust to transform the main gasoline in the USA. Coal use grew till the early 2000s, when different resources turned into inexpensive and its well being and environmental injury turned into unacceptable to extra of the general public.
Whilst “Coalie” could be new, the common sense at the back of it isn’t. For hundreds of years, coal’s promoters have labored arduous to turn coal as risk free – in addition to “clean” and “beautiful,” to make use of President Donald Trump’s phrases.
‘An agreeable heat’
People dwelling with the results of burning coal have disliked it for so long as they’ve burned it.
In 1578, Queen Elizabeth complained that she used to be “greatly grieved and annoyed with [its] taste and smoke” within the air. In 1661, John Evelyne’s treatise Fumifugium defined unfavourable well being results of respiring coal smoke.
In his 1661 treatise Fumifugium, John Evelyne described well being dangers from respiring coal smoke.
College of California San Diego Libraries/Wikimedia
English settlers have been attracted to North The us partially as a result of the continent’s plentiful provide of bushes, an alternative choice to coal that deforestation had made prohibitively pricey in England.
Along with its cheaper price, anthracite coal grew fascinating as a result of its prime carbon, low-sulfur content material, which produced much less visual smoke when it used to be burned. An enthusiastic 1815 letter to the editor of the American Day by day Advertiser captured increasingly more commonplace attitudes towards anthracite as “affor[ding] a very regular and agreeable heat.”
‘A healthful home’
The unfold of anthracite additionally shored up tolerance for smokier however inexpensive bituminous coal.
To lend a hand other people, home tasks manuals aimed on the fossil gasoline’s most commonly feminine customers attempted to invent workarounds for its smoke. In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe, very best referred to as the writer of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and her sister Catharine Beecher wrote one of the Nineteenth-century articles to recognize the “evils” of coal smoke, whilst outlining “modes of making a healthful home,” within the home tasks handbook American Lady’s House.
An 1892 commercial within the Rocky Mountain Information promoted a logo of coal stoves as ‘the best, handsomest and most economical.’
19th Century Newspapers
To stay the youngsters blank and shiny …
Within the Twentieth century, entrepreneurs churned out extra colourful claims about the advantages of coal: One mag commercial confirmed a mom and kid pointing on the crackling range aflame with the corporate’s coal, pronouncing it “cannot be excelled in purity, cleanliness, and free-burning qualities.”
An advert for a coal range described its ‘purity’ and ‘cleanliness.’
Madison Historic, CC BY-NC-SA
In a similar way, the Lackawanna Railroad Corporate got here up with the cultured, ceaselessly rhyming, persona of Phoebe Snow. In a single advert, she issues to the significance of convenience, suggesting that now not most effective may anthracite gasoline quicker shuttle, however it might additionally make your shuttle – and your lifestyles – extra relaxed.
A Phoebe Snow postcard advert from 1912 mentioned keeping off ‘smoke and cinders’ with trains run on anthracite coal.
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania/Wikimedia Commons
Coal advertising and marketing ceaselessly used youngsters to signify protection and succeed in oldsters. Any other iteration of the Phoebe Snow collection promised that anthracite-powered railway shuttle may stay youngsters “clean and bright.”
Probably the most Phoebe Snow advertisements, in 1910, marketed Lackawanna Railway’s coal-powered trains the usage of youngsters and whiteness to signify purity.
Photograph Courtesy of Poster Area/Poster Area Everlasting Assortment
A Thirties commercial went as far as to place a work of anthracite coal subsequent to a kid in a bath, a visible proximity implying that coal used to be as just right as cleaning soap.
In truth, cleaning soap manufactured from “coal tar” – a liquid byproduct of manufacturing coke, a gasoline produced from bituminous coal utilized in business blast furnaces – did (and does) exist. The British corporate Wright’s, additionally fashionable within the U.S., generated a slew of ads praising its cleaning soap as having antiseptic houses for youngsters.
Wright’s Coal Tar Cleaning soap used a slumbering kid wearing white and slumbering on white sheets to promote it its ‘nursery soap,’ which it claimed secure youngsters from an infection, in 1922.
Wikimedia Commons
Every of those ads attempted to capitalize on a mom’s need for wholesome youngsters. And so they driven again in opposition to the picture of the tyrannical “King Coal” that had come about amid moves through miners protesting bad, degraded running and dwelling prerequisites in addition to the upward push of black lung illness.
‘Clean coal’
Via the mid-Twentieth century, petroleum took coal’s position as The us’s primary power supply. The U.S. environmental motion endured to develop, and other people were given desirous about herbal fuel as an alternative choice to coal.
In reaction, coal firms doubled down at the fable of “clean” coal.
An American Electrical Energy advert in The Wall Side road Magazine in 1976 mentioned cleansing coal.
Wall Side road Magazine archive
A 1979 commercial for American Electrical Energy, as an example, flew within the face of Blank Air Act mandates that coal firms make use of “scrubbing” generation to take away sulfur dioxide from smoke – the advert depicted any individual cleansing coal through hand.
The parable continues
Lately, coal generates most effective 16.2% of The us’s electrical energy, down from producing greater than part of the U.S. energy provide within the Nineties. However the nation isn’t carried out with it. Even supposing coal manufacturing nowadays is some distance under its height, as firms attempt to close down previous uneconomic crops, Trump has promised to “reinvigorate” the coal business.
Along with ordering some coal crops to proceed running, the Trump management has pulled out previous coal promotion ways from the previous, together with many times regarding coal as “clean and beautiful.” One symbol inserts Coalie subsequent to a coal-mining circle of relatives that differently seems like an advert that may have seemed a century in the past.
A 2026 promotion for the Workplace of Floor Mining Reclamation and Enforcement features a caricature circle of relatives with ‘Coalie’ added to the image, taking a look like a kid’s toy.
OSMRE
And, like its predecessors, this image tries to offer an blameless symbol of a product that harms human well being and the surroundings.
A 2018 learn about discovered that black lung illness used to be on the upward push in Appalachia, the place about 40% of The us’s coal is mined nowadays. Residing close to a fossil-fuel energy plant exposes citizens to pollution that give a contribution to untimely deaths, bronchial asthma and lung most cancers, together with tiny particulate subject recognized at PM 2.5, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Even if it’s simply sitting in piles ready for use at an influence plant, coal can hurt human well being because the wind blows throughout it and carries coal mud into the air and other people’s lungs.
The parable of coal as wholesome and circle of relatives pleasant has been round for hundreds of years – however coal hasn’t ever been blank, or adorable.
