Eighteen months of the preventable wasting of a domestic resource that could be powering people’s homes instead of being left to escape into the atmosphere. And 18 months of trapping even more heat and driving climate change once it’s up there.

That’s essentially the scenario the Trump administration set into motion last winter when it delayed implementing new standards for methane.

Developed with buy-in from oil and gas companies themselves and finalized in 2024, the standards were designed to encourage operators to find leaks, maintain equipment and cut down on wasted energy. Methane is the primary component of natural gas, of course — and it’s also the most potent climate pollutant, responsible for nearly a third of the warming we’re already experiencing. Methane doesn’t hang in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, but it traps more than 80 times as much heat.

But Trump’s EPA still pushed back requirements to comply with the standards for as long as 18 months — typical, really, for an administration that also tried to throw out limits on carbon pollution for power plants.

Together, though, carbon and methane pollution are costing us dearly, making extreme weather more extreme and creating waves of devastation in every part of the country. Though the Trump administration stopped keeping track shortly after taking office, Climate Central concluded that there’ve been 21 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2026 alone, claiming more than 200 lives and costing more than $50 billion.

Can we really afford any more of that?

My colleagues on Environmental Defense Fund’s Legal and Regulatory team were in court in D.C. yesterday to argue that the delay is illegal. You can read more about the lawsuit here, and we’ll share updates as the story advances here, too.

‘The weather’s changing’

With Tropical Storm Rachel flooding the Las Vegas Strip and multiple wildfires threatening Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and southern California at the same time, the idea that we can afford even one more month of heat-trapping methane escaping into the atmosphere seems preposterous.

It’s clear by now there are no safe havens from extreme weather. As climate change continues to intensify “unnatural” disasters like these, the costs to insure homes and properties against damages have climbed, too. Nationwide, home insurance premiums increased by 46 percent in the past five years, The New York Times reported, writing, “The burden of insurance has gotten to the point where an estimated one-in-seven homeowners are opting to go without insurance to pay other bills.”

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Ahead of the midterms, the Times wrote, the insurance burden has become a “top voter concern” across the country and is shaping races. Federal policies aren’t helping, and families are hurting. Facing a sudden $1,000 mortgage spike in Kansas, for example, which has been plagued by tornadoes, heavy winds and hail, one couple sold their home and moved into a rental where they could at least be closer to their twin daughters’ doctors. The girls’ father said, “It’s harder and harder to take care of all the things we need and the taxes to pay — the weather’s changing and insurance is harder and harder to afford.”

Stories from the States

Texas

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the $72 billion in extra health care costs being imposed on the U.S. by the Trump administration’s energy and environmental policies, as the Associated Press reported last week. It’s a staggering amount of mismanagement — but health care costs might only be the start of it for some families.

After he retired, Leroy Wallace and his wife bought their “dream home” and relocated to be closer to their grandchildren, who are in school near Houston. From their backyard, though, the Wallaces can see the smokestacks of the largest power plant in Texas — a known polluter that received an exemption from Trump’s EPA anyway to ignore clean air laws and release even more pollution.

Now, Wallace said, there are evenings when he is “overwhelmed” by “a bitterness in the air and a burning sensation in his nose and throat.”

Add moving expenses to the administration’s tab, then? He’s had enough. “When my youngest grandchildren graduate from high school in a few years,” he said, “my wife and I plan to move in search of cleaner air.”

It’s clear that there are some kinds of energy — and this is putting it kindly — that the Trump administration disfavors. The president might think “the wind is bullshit,” and the energy secretary might temporarily forget that battery storage exists for those times each day when the sun stops shining, but they’re already powering millions of homes and businesses and saving people serious money.

Only two states get more of their energy supply from wind than Oklahoma, for example. Wind accounts for 42% of its total. Oklahoma produces so much wind it’s able to sell most of it off to other states, and the landowners on whose property the turbines spin earn almost $100 million together every year. It’s no wonder why Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt criticized the Trump administration, saying, “You cannot weaponize these things and just for political purposes put your thumb on the scale.”

But that’s largely what the Trump administration has been doing. Though demand has never been higher, the administration has consistently acted to throttle the country’s supply and obstruct the development of more energy. And making less of something, any economist can tell you, makes it more expensive.

Now, we’re starting to have an idea of the costs.

As much as $6,500 in avoidable electricity expenses for the average American family have been locked in over the next decade and a half, The Associated Press reported this week.

Electricity costs have already gone up in 47 states, and some people’s bills have never been higher. Now, costs are expected to rise further in every single state. Job losses will hit 47 states. The GDP will decline in 46. The country will also see as many as 37,000 extra premature deaths from air pollution and $72 billion in added health care costs, Energy Innovation’s analysis found.

Because of the Trump administration’s policies, one analyst concluded, “the affordability crisis will be worse.”

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Stories from the States

Michigan

One of those policies has been a rash of illegal emergency orders issued by the Department of Energy to keep retiring coal plants from being able to close as planned, often against the wishes of the plant owners themselves.

Built in the early 1960s, the J.H. Campbell plant in western Michigan is the one that has been forced to stay open the longest, and it’s racked up $259 million in operating costs in the meantime, even though its generating capacity had already been replaced by cheaper sources on the grid. Those costs, it’s worth typing here again, are now being passed down to customers in 11 states to pay.

Local and state leaders planned to shutter it for a reason. “The whole point,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said, “was to save money.”

But new reporting from POLITICO suggests that keeping the plant open might have consequences during the midterm elections. The plant is sited in a district that’s been represented by a Republican for 90 years, but Rep. Bill Huizenga is now “taking heat” for the Trump administration’s losing energy policies, as new polling shows that Michiganders are primarily concerned with the cost of living.

“Campbell,” POLITICO reports, “is a concrete example that Trump’s policies are why life is getting more expensive.”

Missouri

Another coal plant — the largest in Missouri — might be a concrete example that the Trump administration’s policies are why life is getting less healthy.

First, some context. In 2024, the EPA strengthened protections that limit the amount of brain-damaging mercury and other harmful air pollutants released from coal plants. The protections, which us nerds call the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, had saved hundreds of thousands of lives since first being implemented in 2012 — but then the Trump administration took office and started inviting industrial facilities all over the country to ask for presidential “exemptions” from MATS and other clean air laws.

All the companies had to do was send an email.

Now, along with 200 other copper smelters and medical sterilizers everywhere from Houston to Phoenix, the coal plant in Labadie will be allowed to continue fouling the air.

Only four power plants in the country release more mercury than this one, and mercury can cause all kinds of health problems, especially for kids, whose developing brains and bodies can be harmed permanently. Mercury can even cross the placenta, harming the fetus before it’s ever taken a breath.

One Labadie resident has seen the pollution return, as though she’s now living in a bizarro sequel to “WALL-E.” Some days, she can smell it. “We feel like we’re being sacrificed,” she told Missouri public radio. “We’re being sacrificed for profits.”

Ohio

Over the last five brutally hot summers, the average electricity bill in Ohio has increased by 53%. This summer, the hottest ever recorded, the high costs also contributed to an increase in the number of electricity shutoffs, Canary Media reported, writing, “More and more Ohioans are struggling to pay their utility bills.”

At the same time, as the Trump administration has continued to falsely vilify cheap wind and solar power and attacked tax incentives for more clean energy and manufacturing, the state has lost economic momentum, seeing the cancellation of $1.3 billion in investment and the loss of more than 7,000 jobs.

It’s a bad time for the bills to be going up, that’s to say. This week, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, Elaine Labalme, traveled to the state capitol. She reports:

“I’ve spent the last several days talking to folks in different neighborhoods, everywhere from Hilltop in southwest Columbus and leafy Dublin to the north. But I keep hearing the same thing: People know how much their electricity bill is. They know how much it’s gone up. They’re not happy about it, and they’re worried about how much higher it’ll go this winter. They’ve made it clear that they can’t keep going on like this.”

Michelle Bloodworth, the president of a lobbying group called America’s Power, sent a letter last spring detailing steps the U.S. Department of Energy could take to give the declining coal industry a hand in these tough economic times.

And “the Trump administration,” The New York Times reported this week, “has since taken each of those steps.”

Writing letters like this is what lobbyists do, of course. But what’s so unprecedented, as the Times shows, is that the requests of a few private citizens were turned almost summarily into public policy at everyone else’s expense. Ted Kelly, an expert in energy and law with Environmental Defense Fund, said, “The industry swung for the fences and got everything they asked for.”

This week:

The letter, the spirit

It’s no mystery why it’s been 13 years since the last coal-burning power plant was built in the U.S. (And that one, in Texas, is currently broken. So much for these plants being “essential to maintaining a reliable, affordable and resilient electricity supply,” as Bloodworth put it.) Coal simply no longer makes economic sense when there are so many other cheaper, cleaner sources of energy already generating electricity and waiting to connect to our grids. This year, for the first time, the U.S. produced more power with solar than coal.

So did the rest of the planet.

So why save coal? Why now? Bloodworth’s letter cites a “national energy emergency.” But, ruling in September that the Department of Energy’s order forcing a retiring coal plant in Michigan to stay open is illegal, a federal court wrote, “there is no emergency.”

Still, the order has cost customers in 11 Midwestern states more than $259 million and counting in unwanted operating costs. And the plant has spewed more than 140 tons of life-shortening soot, 1,000 tons of health-harming NOx and 2,000 tons of lung-searing sulfur dioxide that never had to be released into the air.

Similar orders citing similar grid “emergencies” have been made at coal plants in Colorado, Florida, Indiana and Washington, and the health and economic costs are piling up there, too. Or, as another member of the Trump administration told the coal industry, “Many of the items on your wish list have been done.”

Read more here.

Even more pain at the pump

The Times’ reporting makes clear that there’s been a consistent disconnect between what the Trump administration says it’s going to do and what it does.

President Trump campaigned on cutting electricity prices in half, for example, but these handouts to the coal industry have only introduced hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary operating expenses.

That’s not to mention that the administration has also rushed to obstruct the development of other sources of energy that would be saving people money on their electricity bills if it hadn’t.

You can see the same disconnect in the administration’s other big move this week, which was repealing fuel efficiency standards. Acting in the name of “affordability,” the administration decided to allow new cars and trucks to get fewer miles to the gallon. That will only end up forcing people to have to buy more gas — which has never been more expensive — much more often. The standards, in fact, would have saved 64 billion gallons of gas.

As it is, nearly half of all Americans say they are already driving less to try to save money, and they are buying fewer large trucks and SUVs.

Now, the repeal of the standards will add more costs on top of everything else — an average of $1,600 over the life of a vehicle, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated. “For decades, our national fuel economy standards have steadily made our vehicles more efficient and less expensive to drive,” Andy Su, a transportation attorney at Environmental Defense Fund, said. “Raising costs on Americans is exactly the opposite of what we need. These rules won’t just slam the brakes on progress – they’ll throw us in reverse.”

Today, a coalition of environmental organizations sued the Trump administration to stop the repeal. Read more here.

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Stories from the States

California

During Climate Week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state was preparing to add a third partner and link its successful program requiring life-saving cuts in heat-trapping, climate-altering pollution with Washington’s.

Known as “cap-and-invest,” the program puts a limit (or “cap”) on climate pollution and requires polluters to turn in allowances equivalent to that pollution. The allowances are auctioned off quarterly, and the revenue that’s generated is then invested back in local communities. Since 2012, California’s program has generated more than $36 billion. Washington’s newer program, launched in 2023, has generated more than $3 billion already.

A much larger market between the two states and existing partner Quebec will lead to greater pollution cuts regionally and raise even more revenue for governments to invest in everything from new electric school buses to tax rebates to wildfire protections, Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense Fund, said. “By scaling up proven and efficient pollution-cutting programs, states can deliver savings for families and businesses, while making a huge impact on our national emissions,” he said. “More states should follow their lead.”

North Carolina

Duke Energy, the largest utility in North Carolina and one of the largest in the U.S., requested a permit to expand a massive power plant that burns natural gas in anticipation of a potential rise in electricity demand driven by data centers. The state’s utility commission refused.

It was the right decision, Will Scott, who directs policy in the state for Environmental Defense Fund, wrote. He explained:

“Building a new gas plant is essentially taking out a 30-year mortgage on our utility bills. If tech demand shifts or cleaner options take over down the road, everyday customers are left paying off the enormous cost of an expensive, polluting power plant — one that it turns out we never needed — for decades.”

What makes more sense than a costly new gas plant or ersatz system of dirty back-up generators, Scott added, is an approach deploying a mix of clean energy that’s proven successful in other parts of the country. “Under a setup like this,” he wrote, “tech companies cover the cost of their own energy footprint, local communities are spared smoke and noise and ratepayers are protected from footing the bill for bad investments.”

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The Trump administration often tries to call things it wants to go away a “hoax.” President Trump did make his name as a branding expert, after all. Climate change? It’s been a “hoax” since 2012 at least.

Affordability, President Trump started claiming as voters voiced concerns about electricity prices? That’s a “hoax,” too.

This week, when the administration repealed the last remaining limits on the heat-trapping climate pollution that’s allowed to be released from fossil fuel-burning power plants, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin touted all the “savings” that would result. But a preliminary analysis of the impacts of the repeal — which was challenged in court yesterday — by my colleagues at Environmental Defense Fund shows those “savings” might be better thought of as a hoax themselves.

The increased pollution resulting from the repeal, the analysis found, would cause up to 84,000 extra premature deaths and more than $3 trillion in health and climate-related harms over the next two decades. “Tearing down our national protections against climate pollution from power plants will have enormous costs for the health, safety and well-being of families across the country,” EDF’s Vickie Patton told the Associated Press. “Americans everywhere are already suffering from record-breaking heat, more dangerous floods and storms and skyrocketing insurance costs.”

Also this week:

Note: The Work will not be published next week. We’ll be back in your inboxes Friday, October 2.

An emergency in name only

Before the Trump administration threw out the limits on heat-trapping climate pollution at fossil fuel-burning power plants, the Department of Energy spent more than a year forcing more than a few of the same plants to stay open for a reason that’s now been flatly dismissed.

The “emergency” the DOE cited to justify orders appears to be one more hoax, a federal court concluded. The aging plants simply haven’t been needed to keep the A/C running and the lights on, data show, even during this year’s surge in demand from data centers and record-breaking extreme heat. But the orders to keep them open have imposed real costs.

The J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan — the plant at the center of the federal court judgment — has burned through $259 million for essentially no reason. Further analysis shows that the air pollution that’s resulted from the orders across the country has imposed harms that never had to happen. The pollution has “caused between 33 to 59 premature deaths, 46 emergency room visits for respiratory distress, 132 new cases of asthma, 7,548 missed school days, and 2,697 missed workdays totaling between $530 to $901 million” in losses that would have been avoided had the plants retired as planned.

Stories from the States

Texas

While Administrator Zeldin was announcing the repeal of the power plant rule at a gathering of energy executives in Houston, Lexi Ambrogi, my colleague at EDF, was on the other side of town, meeting with a man who feels as though the pollution from the plant he can see from his home is already too much for his family to live with. Lexi writes:

When Leroy Wallace retired from his career as a federal officer in Albuquerque and moved to the outskirts of Houston, he thought he’d found his dream home: closer to his big family, with deer wandering between yards and fish swimming in a lake behind his property line. But sometimes, when he goes outside in the evening, he’s overwhelmed by a bitterness in the air and a burning sensation when he breathes. An invitation to a meeting about the Parish power plant, slipped under his windshield wiper by a local advocate, changed how he thinks about the four towering stacks he can see from his backyard every day. Since then, the plant was given one of the Trump administration’s exemptions from laws limiting mercury and other toxic air pollution. And now this? What will it take to cut the plant’s pollution? When his youngest grandchildren graduate from high school in a few years, he said, he and his wife plan to sell their dream home and move in search of cleaner air.

California

California, which is home to the two largest and busiest ports in the country and more people than any other state, has long been granted waivers under the Clean Air Act to set pollution standards that are distinct from national ones to better protect its population’s health and bring fuel costs down. This week, though, the state’s right to set air quality standards for some waterborne vessels has been attacked, potentially allowing more toxic pollution to be released from ports and into communities along the coast. Both the House of Representatives and Senate could soon consider further steps to limit the traffic-choked state’s ability to protect the people who live there from even more kinds of transportation-related pollution.

And that was the hottest summer in U.S. history, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed this week.

August, in fact, has never been so bad. It led the college football season to kick off with a sputter and a gasp. South Carolina’s game was called due to “searing temperatures” with 10 minutes left to play. Two schools in Kansas agreed to end their game in a tie rather than risk playing overtime.

Even after a win, the first thing Indiana Coach Curt Cignetti said had nothing to do with the defending champions’ dominating performance. “I heard the heat index was at 152,” he told the media, “which I’ve never heard of in my life.”

In Texas, anyway, it doesn’t look as though it’ll be any better this weekend than last, either.

While teams have been installing their offenses, though, the Trump administration has considered cutting one of the federal government’s last lines of defense against the heat-trapping, climate-altering pollution that’s causing the problem. We’ll break that down below.

This week:

More pollution!?

In August, the Trump administration proposed getting rid of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rule that limits the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that can be released from power plants.

This, after also refusing earlier to limit methane, which is responsible for about a third of the warming we’re already experiencing. And that, after dismissing the government’s fundamental legal and scientific determination that climate change even threatens our health and safety in the first place.

A draft of the proposal was sent for review to the White House before Labor Day, E&E News by POLITICO reported, as part of a larger campaign to prevent all future administrations from being able to limit climate pollution.

Meanwhile, as college football fans saw last weekend, climate pollution is already making life more dangerous and more expensive. The University of Alabama, for one, made sure to have 30,000 pounds of ice on hand and 10-15 bottles of water for each player on their football team on Saturday.

Cities across the country are rushing to protect their residents from extreme heat, which kills more people than all other climate-related weather disasters combined. In Houston, for example, the city council just strengthened an ordinance requiring all landlords to ensure their tenants have access to air-conditioning equipment that can keep their homes cooler than 80 degrees.

That’s not exactly the “concierge, white-glove service” the Trump administration bragged about providing the oil and gas industry last summer. Or, as one state industry regulator in Texas groused as the world gets hotter and hotter, “just turn the damn air conditioner up.”

Recommended reading

The economics of solar power might save thousands of jobs from Trump administration attacks | Vital Signs

I read the new U.N. climate report so you don’t have to | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on Substack

Stories from the States

Pennsylvania

But it’s not only more harmful climate and air pollution that’s driving what appears to be widespread antipathy to data centers. Governments at every level are scrambling to respond. In 2026, 15 states have considered legislation for moratoriums or bans, and 39 states introduced legislation on data center’s electricity use, and 31 on water use.

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Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has tried to implement new guidelines, signing an executive order for data centers with development standards. Developers are required to bring their own power generation, meet clean-energy requirements, pay for infrastructure needed to serve their electricity demand, secure local approval and meet environmental, water quality, transparency and community engagement requirements.

Complicating the response is another EPA proposal that would get rid of the minimum public comment period for “minor sources of pollution,” a category that includes data centers. The proposal could allow them to go up faster, before communities could ask questions. “Data centers and other polluters shouldn’t be able to move into our neighborhoods on the sly and keep communities in the dark about their air pollution impacts,” Surbhi Sarang, my colleague in Washington D.C., at Environmental Defense Fund, said.

Virginia

In Virginia, which has more data centers than anywhere else in the world, one school district is investing in clean energy to keep electricity costs down and the lights on, even during emergencies.

Roanoke City Public Schools is adding a battery-storage system to rooftop solar arrays at its two high schools, creating “microgrids” that will allow them to remain open as Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated shelters in the case of disasters that cause widespread power outages.

These investments, Canary Media reported, pay for themselves — and then some: “The solar arrays are poised to cover 44% of the schools’ energy needs, cutting the school system’s electric bills by more than $22 million over 35 years. Because many installations come with new roofs, they’ll also help the district avoid $24 million in capital costs.”

Michigan

Today, a federal court rejected the Trump administration’s repeated claims and ruled there is “no emergency” justifying the Department of Energy’s orders that have required a coal-burning, money-losing power plant in Michigan to stay open indefinitely past its planned retirement. (You can read the whole saga here.)

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Having been extended for more than a year, now, the orders have created at least $259 million in unexpected costs that the utility’s customers are bearing. Similar “emergency” orders have been issued for retiring coal plants in Indiana, Colorado, Washington and Florida.

The bottom line? “The Department of Energy’s unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” EDF’s Ted Kelly said.

NOTE: This is the second part of a two-part series exploring the Trump administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” attacks on U.S. offshore wind. Read Part 1. — AW

How is the Trump administration using your money to raise your energy bills?

After five consecutive failed attempts in court to stop five offshore wind projects from being completed, the Trump administration tried a different approach this spring: It gave a company $928 million to abandon its plans altogether.

Since then, a rash of similar “deals” for companies to give up their leases for offshore wind projects have followed, totalling nearly $4 billion now — all in taxpayer dollars.

Several of these deals specifically went to companies that also have fossil fuels in their portfolios, and all seven have since poured those taxpayer dollars into more polluting energy production or processing. TotalEnergies even “pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects” in the U.S., essentially making these buyouts an indirect investment in fossil fuels, Phelps Turner, Environmental Defense Fund’s U.S. Clean Energy Attorney, said.

The money for this is coming out of the federal Judgment Fund, a money pool Congress set up to pay legal settlements when the government loses in court.

But there’s just one problem: the government didn’t lose anything. A coalition of states sued the government in June, arguing the buyouts are an illegal use of the fund since there was no litigation to settle, just a payout engineered to slash the offshore wind industry.

You get to pay twice

Everyday Americans did lose, though.

An offshore wind project, just like the ones the administration paid to terminate, saved New England customers $2 million a day during a blustery cold snap this winter.

Turbines generate power based on how often the wind is blowing, and offshore wind blows “almost all the time,” Turner said. Offshore energy supply is not only abundant, then, but it’s highly reliable. Paired with storage, it can strengthen the reliability of the whole electric system.

Using taxpayer money to obstruct this supply means we pay twice. Once through the buyout itself — and then again through the cheaper electricity no one will ever get to use because it will never be produced.

‘Chilling effect’

But the damage isn’t only personal, Turner said.

Another risk is the “chilling effect” the approach creates as companies grow wary of investing in new projects, not wanting to get dragged into expensive, protracted legal battles. That hesitancy puts the future of offshore wind, and its cost-saving potential for ratepayers, on even shakier ground.

As Green Energy Consumer Alliance’s executive director Larry Chretien said, “The actions of the administration have affected the market broadly. Fewer developers are willing to try to build a project, and it’s unclear when the next one will move forward.”

“It’s another example of the question: why would an entity interested in maximizing profits and interested in legal, financial and permitting certainty want to enter this space?” Turner said. “I think they’re going to see a lot of risk, and they’re not going to want to invest in this industry because of these contractual arrangements.”

Even in the best-case scenario — developers coming back to the table and resuming projects once there’s a new, less-hostile administration — the delays and buyouts send a signal to developers eyeing the industry: get involved, and you might end up stuck in a resource-draining, years-long holdup.

“It doesn’t make sense [if you’re just looking at it from a bottom-line perspective] to not develop offshore wind,” Turner said. “We all want the lights to stay on, and we all want electricity to be cheaper. Offshore wind really helps with both of those things.”

Amisha Kumar, Environmental Defense Fund’s Healthy Communities communications intern this summer, is an MIT Science Writing master’s student whose work has appeared in The Baltimore Banner, Boston Business Journal and ProPublica, among others.

NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series exploring the Trump administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” attacks on U.S. offshore wind. Part 2 goes live next Tuesday. — AW

During this winter’s frequent cold snaps, as demand for electricity spiked with New Englanders staying home more and running their heat around the clock, a new wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket delivered so much reliable power it saved the region an estimated $2 million a day.

And it was still being built.

Despite this money-saving performance, Vineyard Wind 1 still became one of five under-construction wind projects off the Atlantic Coast that the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of the Interior ordered to stop work.

The DOI cited classified national-security concerns about the turbines interfering with military radar, even though those concerns had already been reviewed and cleared during the original permitting process. As the only project of the five that had begun sending power to the grid before the stop work order, Vineyard Wind was ultimately granted permission to keep current operations, but the delays created costly consequences all of New England will face for years to come.

Compounding on down

Six weeks after the orders, federal judges summarily reinstated all five projects through preliminary injunctions, each finding the same flaw: DOI’s order was a one-page directive with no reasoned explanation, and agencies overlooked the harm of freezing nearly finished construction.

According to court documents and the American Clean Power Association, delaying the last 5% of Vineyard Wind’s remaining construction cost an additional $2 million a day — nearly $72 million in all over the course of the 36-day freeze.

“It’s ironic,” the Green Energy Consumer Alliance’s executive director Larry Chretien said. “You’d hope the administration would act consistently with its stated goal of making energy more affordable.”

What’s more, over the next 10 years, customers along the Atlantic Coast could see an estimated $45 billion in additional costs from the delay of these five projects, according to the ACP.

Why? Savings from cheaper energy sources don’t hit bills right away, because most customers are locked into rates set months or years in advance. A turbine spinning today doesn’t lower this month’s bill.

Instead, Chretien said, it reshapes future contracts. Every megawatt of cheaper wind pushes the most expensive generator (like oil and gas plants, for example) out of the bidding, lowering the price paid that hour, creating a “price suppression effect” that shows up the next time a supplier sets a new rate.

So, a stop-work order doesn’t just raise costs on the days a project sits idle, it delays the point when the project will start suppressing prices. Missed savings today become more missed savings tomorrow.

That compounding delay hits New England especially hard. The region already leans on natural gas more than most — with limited land for solar and onshore wind and pipelines serving heating and electricity-generating needs in winter months — which is exactly why prices spike so volatilely during cold snaps. Offshore wind is the region’s clearest way out of that dependence. Delay it, and there’s no real backup plan close to its scale.

Whose wishes?

Campaigning in 2024, President Trump asked oil and gas executives to give $1 billion for a “policy wish list” he would grant once elected, the Brennan Center for Justice found. The industry became his top financial backers — at least $75 million was donated to his campaign and more than $25 million to his main super PAC.

Since then, whether it saves you money or not, the Trump administration has delivered billions of dollars in tax incentives for oil and gas while obstructing other sources of energy, including issuing an executive order withdrawing parts of the country for offshore wind leasing.

But increasing reliance on fossil fuels comes at the worst time, Chretien said. It will only leave customers more exposed to price shocks tied to global instability. “These projects are proving to not only help us reduce pollution but also strengthen our ability to meet peak demand and withstand climate change.”

Take South Fork Wind, off the coasts of New York and Rhode Island, for example. Online longer than Vineyard Wind and already at commercial scale, it’s the clearest proof offshore wind performs reliably year-round, he said.

It posted capacity factors — which is how well a wind farm is performing relative to how it would do in ideal conditions — higher than 80% on several January days, generated power on 99% of days and 90% of all hours in 2025, and hit a 75% capacity factor during this Fourth of July heat wave — topping 90% on July 2nd.

“The actions of the administration have affected the market broadly,” Chretien said. “Fewer developers are willing to try to build a project, and it’s unclear when the next one will move forward.”

Amisha Kumar, Environmental Defense Fund’s Healthy Communities communications intern this summer, is an MIT Science Writing master’s student whose work has appeared in The Baltimore Banner, Boston Business Journal and ProPublica, among others.

ADMINISTRATOR LEE ZELDIN “HAS TRANSFORMED the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment,” The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in May, “into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters.”

Two months later, there’s no longer anything “more or less” about it. Zeldin openly told a room of coal industry executives this week that his agency is “proud to protect and advance” their highly polluting product. “Many of the items that were on your wish list,” he reassured them, “are now done.”

It’s important to remember that Zeldin is not LARPing as the chair of some Friends of Soot revival group or Civil War-era regional Chamber of Commerce. New sources of clean energy like solar and wind make much more economic — and public health — sense than new coal or gas.

Working so hard for the coal industry, in fact, is only working against us:

• Even though 99% of coal plants cost more to run than it would cost to replace them with clean energy, the Trump administration handed out $1 billion in subsidies to help prop them up; household electricity prices have increased by 18%.

• At the same time, the EPA repealed the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards updates, allowing coal plants to pollute more brain-damaging mercury and life-shortening soot while handing out illegal Clean Air Act exemptions to let 71 coal plants across 24 states ignore other pollution laws, too. Levels of two pollutants common to coal plants are the highest they’ve been in decades.

• Plus, the Trump administration is illegally mandating six coal plants to remain open past their retirement dates. When this happens, a member of the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council said, “all costs end up on ratepayers.” It’s been about $1.5 million a day — even though two of the plants haven’t been needed and another is currently broken.

Running the EPA, it seems, Zeldin has more or less transformed into a real-life version of Coalie, all the way down to the pristine white gloves, helping deliver what the administration called “concierge service” to the very industries President Trump hit up for $1 billion in campaign donations.

All along, Zeldin has bragged that his agency has been protecting the environment and growing the economy. “It is not a binary choice,” he told Congress.

But continuing to choose coal is choosing neither.

Better for everyone

Late last week, as wildfire smoke was pushing the Air Quality Index to levels considered “unhealthy for everyone,” a federal district court ruled that the Trump administration must carry out its responsibility under the Clean Air Act to implement nationwide standards for the pollutant that is the primary threat to public health in wildfire smoke.

It’s a big deal, because soot is the most widespread and deadliest air pollutant in the country even when wildfires aren’t raging.

Soot is composed of tiny particles, invisible to the naked eye, that can lodge in the lungs and enter the bloodstream, where they contribute to serious health issues. It’s the same pernicious stuff two community groups in Houston petitioned the state to monitor for years, because it’s often worse the closer you live to freeways and warehouses. (And coal plants.) One Harvard study conducted about 10 years ago now found that soot contributed to 5,000 premature deaths and caused as much as $50 billion in economic losses in one year in Houston all by itself.

Nationwide, soot claims 50,000 lives a year. In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted a more protective standard, but President Trump’s EPA gave up defending it. Last fall, though, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the stronger standard, and this month’s ruling compels the Trump administration to act accordingly.

It’s welcome news, Richard Yates, one of my colleagues on Environmental Defense Fund’s legal and regulatory team, said.

“EPA’s own scientists found that implementing the soot standard would save 4,500 lives each year while also preventing hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and emergency room visits — as well as cases of lung cancer, heart disease and dementia. The court just set a firm deadline for EPA to designate which communities are breathing unsafe air, which is the first step toward cleaning it up.”

This week in The Work

Stories from the States

Illinois

How deadly and widespread is soot? In Illinois, more than one in four people live within half a mile of a warehouse, Environmental Defense Fund found.

That means they live with endless sooty diesel exhaust from the heavy-duty trucks that pull up all day long. Will County, which is just outside the international logistics hub that is Chicago, sees 112,000 diesel-burning trucks every single day.

Proposals to expand operations could bring 16,000 more trucks a day to places like Will County that are already beset with too much soot, The Chicago Tribune reported. The trucks’ pollution contributes to at least 1,300 premature deaths every year in the area, Northwestern University researchers found.

Both elected officials and community leaders are trying to work with developers to find some common ground. But the spread of e-commerce — combined now with the Trump administration’s move to weaken standards for diesel pollution — are leaving some residents worried that they won’t be able to stay much longer. One couple is considering selling their home of 38 years. “I literally won’t be able to breathe,” Terri Papish, who suffers a chronic allergy to the exhaust, said. “I will be forced out if I have the diesel right on top of me.”

Arizona

Many Arizonans are saying the same thing about increasingly extreme heat. Climate change is turning the state into a blast furnace, especially during the summer. Two years ago, Phoenix saw more than 100 days hotter than 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a row. Pedestrians who suffered heat stroke and fell onto the scorching sidewalks were admitted to the hospital with second-degree burns.

It can be dangerous to be outside. As heat waves get hotter and drag on longer, now, the state is trying to make sure it’s safe inside.

Lawmakers have said that teachers report classroom temperatures as high as 85 degrees. That can negatively impact attendance, behavior and academic performance. As children prepare to head back again to school, concerned residents are pushing for more funding to upgrade aging buildings and replace overworked HVAC systems that are no longer up to the task — while others urge state leaders to take advantage of the state’s 300 days of sunshine and speed the development of the kinds of energy that don’t make climate change worse.

Add to your tabs

An OMB plan to defund science — and anything Trump doesn’t like | The New Yorker

The report oil companies are worried about | Ars Technica

Majority of U.S. voters link extreme weather to climate crisis, study finds | The Guardian

A THUNDERSTORM CLEARED THE AIR of wildfire smoke long enough for Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina to kick off at the New York New Jersey Stadium as planned. But the Air Quality Index the day before reached 157, which is considered “unhealthy for everyone.”

Unhealthy, that is, to go outside. To breathe. To play a game.

Presumably, New York natives President Trump and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin noticed the smoky skies, but it’s unlikely either man studied the new report released just days before the final match that determined science is getting better and better at understanding how climate change is making extreme weather worse and worse.

The two men have spent the better part of this administration — with the $250 billion wildfires in Los Angeles still smoldering when they took office — downplaying climate change altogether, dismissing the dangers, deterring the solutions and driving up the costs we will have to incur.

But climate change, President Trump said, is “not our problem.”

After working to repeal the Endangerment Finding, the government’s fundamental legal and scientific determination that the pollution altering the climate is harming us, too, Administrator Zeldin went as far as delivering the keynote address at the annual conference of the Heartland Institute, a fringe organization that got its start using Big Tobacco money to argue that smoking might not be so bad for you.

Released Thursday, the new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine — formed by Congress to serve as the authority on these questions for the past 70 years — upholds the science that runs counter to the administration’s denials. It confirms that scientists are able to attribute with confidence precisely the ways climate change is worsening all kinds of extreme weather from hurricanes to heat waves.

It’s no longer a question of whether, the report makes clear, it’s a question of how much.

But the Trump administration isn’t asking, and it’s actively undercutting the solutions. Repealing the Endangerment Finding alone is expected to impose billions and billions of dollars in new fuel costs and health harms in the years to come. The U.S. has already spent more than $3 trillion on climate-related disasters since we started keeping track in 1980.

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two days before President Trump settled into the luxury box to watch Spain defeat Argentina, the state’s Attorney General Dana Nessel laid out the stakes. The Trump administration, she said, overrode years of planning to retire a money-losing coal plant whose decades of pollution fouled the air and water and contributed to the conditions that are making heat waves hotter, wildfires wilder and hurricanes more ferocious.

Attorney General Nessel’s no attribution scientist, but she made it clear who’s to blame for the darkening skies we’re living under.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION KEEPS BURNING through taxpayer money, and electricity prices keep going up, anyway.

As part of its latest round of hundred-million-dollar handouts to the coal industry, the administration said it would dole out $100 million to build two new coal-burning power plants in West Virginia and Alaska. The cost, CNN reported, could be “astronomical” — more than four times as much as it would cost, an independent analysis found, to develop the same amount of solar power.

No coal plants have been built in the U.S. in more than a decade, and the last two that were — one in Texas, and one in Indiana — make it awfully clear why.

Within two years, the plant in Indiana became Duke Energy’s least efficient plant overall, despite being its newest. And the plant in Texas stopped running altogether in April 2025.

Sandy Creek, east of Waco, cost $1.2 billion originally to build, but Alison Wenzel, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund in Texas, noticed on a recent road trip that the plant was missing its telltale pollution.

As it turns out, the plant experienced a major equipment failure and won’t be available to produce any electricity for anyone until at least 2027 — and no one’s missed it.

Even as data centers have rushed to the state, the market-driven, widespread development of cheap, reliable sources of wind and solar energy and battery storage has helped meet record-breaking demand and kept prices relatively stable. With Sandy Creek AWOL, ERCOT, the grid operator in Texas, hasn’t needed to issue a single voluntary conservation notice since 2024.

READ MORE: ‘He’s forcing higher bills’: Trump spends billions to kill clean energy and keep coal alive | The Guardian

The U.S. no longer needs coal plants, as Ted Kelly, another colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, has said over and over and over.

And over. And over.

And over.

That’s because there are very good reasons why none has been built in 13 years. They cost too much to run. They pollute too much. They are not particularly reliable, despite the administration’s claims. Ironically, coal plants tend to break down during the increasingly extreme heat that their own climate-changing pollution is making worse. They are a big part of the problem.

President Trump has already whiffed on his self-imposed deadline, set when he was campaigning two summers ago, to cut electricity prices in half. All this roulette with no-reward coal is going about as well as things did in the ‘90s at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

Still, staring at household electricity prices that have gone up by 18% so far, the administration keeps doubling down on the riskiest choice — the most expensive, least reliable source of energy we have.

More polluter passes

To make matters worse, the Trump administration keeps giving exemptions to coal plants and other industrial facilities to ignore environmental laws.

Last March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up a special email address and invited more than 500 of the country’s largest industrial facilities to ask for free passes, essentially, to release more of the kinds of pollution that can cause premature death, heart disease and cancer.

READ MORE: Trump exempted some of the nation’s biggest polluters from air quality rules. All it took was an email. | ProPublica

In more than a few cases, the facilities had already installed the technology they needed to comply with the law they were asking to ignore. Previously, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona tried to wrap his head around allowing a century-old copper smelter a mile from an elementary school to pollute even more brain-damaging lead than it already is.

After handing out more than 180 passes like Halloween candy already, the administration exempted even more facilities this week from a rule that was estimated to reduce air toxics-related cancer risk for people who live nearby by 96%.

“The Trump administration has once again tried to open a back door for polluters to avoid following basic clean air rules,” Rosalie Winn, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “These protections are intended to keep people safe from some of the most toxic forms of air pollution. Ripping them away will mean more cancer, more children struggling to breathe and more lives cut short.”

We’ve been keeping track of all the exemptions. You can search our map to explore which facilities have requested and been granted them so far. (It’ll be updated soon to include this week’s additions!)

Add to your tabs

Here’s how offshore wind helped New England beat record heat | Canary Media

EPA proposal could delay smog cleanup for a decade or more in the nation’s most polluted areas | Environmental Defense Fund

Trump officials accused of stacking top chemical safety board with industry ‘mouthpieces’ | The Guardian

Stories from the States

Even though not a single data center has been proposed to be built where I live, our city council responded recently to hours of public comment and advanced a one-year ban. As they become more and more concerning to communities across the country, two states have taken action of their own.

New York

On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order that puts a similar one-year moratorium on any new data center of a certain size. Kate Boicourt, my colleague in New York, explained what it means:

“This executive order acknowledges the pressing questions New Yorkers have about data center development and the need for smart grid planning. State leaders should use this moment to catalyze system-wide reforms to the ways we plan, permit and pay for energy. These transformations are needed to create a modern grid that protects ratepayers and supports the clean, affordable and reliable power so critical to our state’s future.”

Texas

Virginia has more data centers than anywhere else in the world, but Texas is closing in fast. The state already has 335 data centers humming along, and 247 more are in development.

And they will require a lot of electricity. (Not to mention water.)

And that raises a lot of questions. Is the state’s grid — which for the most part does not connect to others — going to fail again? How is Texas going to produce enough power to meet demand as its population grows, too?

Who’s going to pay for it?

Two of my colleagues in Texas tried to provide answers this week and urged state leaders, ahead of another legislative session, to start planning now:

“Policymakers, tech companies and utilities should create enabling conditions for data centers to realize bring-your-own clean power solutions that can serve their load, reduce costs and reduce stress on the grid. They should also expand access to distributed energy resources — such as residential battery storage, rooftop solar and energy efficiency — to support data center growth and increase reliability. At the same time, they should ensure data centers strengthen, rather than strain, local water resources, and take further steps to protect ratepayers from price increases spurred by data centers.”

In case you missed it

THE SAME ADMINISTRATION THAT ADMITTED in court it kept federal grants vindictively from states President Trump lost in the last election is now trying to politicize the way the government spends taxpayer money.

Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget — which accounts for every dollar that comes in and goes out — proposed a new rule that would give political appointees a kind of veto power and subject all federal discretionary awards to partisan arbitrariness and caprice. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, but the rule would allow the administration to thwart funding Congress allocated for new scientific research, for example, to improve air quality near a busy port, just because.

So, what’s at stake?

Vought’s OMB’s proposed rule poses a risk to federal funding broadly, but it would especially complicate the missions of agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all of which depend on federal discretionary awards.

• EPA grants fund state, tribal, local and community efforts to reduce air and water pollution, manage hazardous waste and toxic chemicals like PFAS, respond to disasters and manage contaminated sites.

• DOE research and assistance programs promote cleaner technologies, energy efficiency, grid reliability, industrial innovation and scientific advancement.

• NOAA programs support coastal management, fisheries, ocean science, weather and climate research and public safety.

All this work is under threat if an administration’s political appointees can go over Congress’ head and unilaterally control what researchers are allowed to study, which institutions receive research funding and which states and localities are awarded federal grants. Or, in other words:

This isn’t the first time Vought has taken steps to make it harder to protect the American people’s health and safety. He once said he intended to put career public servants — the veritable army of well-trained technical experts and analysts who do research, set standards and enforce laws — in so much “trauma” they’d stop wanting to show up for work.

How has discretionary spending worked until now?

Come with us down, down into the weeds. Since 2013, OMB has published the “Uniform Guidance” that establishes consistent administrative requirements, cost principles and audit requirements for federal discretionary awards across agencies.

Essentially, it’s an accounting manual for the federal government.

Separately, Congress authorizes an agency to award discretionary funding for specific purposes. Agency-specific regulations and guidance then supply more detailed requirements, which often include expert-led merit- and peer-review processes designed to ensure federal dollars go toward the research and projects best positioned to fulfill Congress’s stated goals.

Until now, this Uniform Guidance has primarily served to inform agencies’ implementation of these programs.

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Now what?

The proposed rule is seeking to significantly revise the Uniform Guidance to codify changes that will grant OMB newfound authority to make federal awards subject to the Trump administration’s ideological preferences, regardless of Congress’s directives.

Here are the primary provisions you need to know about and what they mean:

1. OMB proposes to convert Uniform Guidance into a binding regulation.

This change would render this OMB rule, and its future rules issued under the same authority, immediately binding across the federal government.

2. OMB proposes adopting a new “pre-issuance review” process for senior political appointees based on the administration’s policy preferences.

This change would render all discretionary awards subject to an extra layer of scrutiny by political appointees, creating new opportunities to insert political bias and ideological litmus tests into federal grantmaking.

3. OMB proposes allowing agencies to terminate awards that no longer advance administration priorities.

This would impose significant uncertainty on all federal grantees, many of whom rely on federal dollars to support long-term projects.

4. OMB proposes to treat the required peer-review processes as merely advisory and second to the judgment of an agency’s politically appointed leaders.

This change would undermine the effectiveness of federal grantmaking, particularly in scientific research where expert review is vital to ensuring that U.S.-supported science leads the world.

This week, a coalition of environmental groups including Environmental Defense Fund delivered formal comments strongly opposing OMB’s proposed rule.

WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP SIGNED the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act into law last summer, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, said, “This stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country.” One year later, it’s clear the bill is even worse than that.

Joanna Slaney, the vice president for political and government affairs at Environmental Defense Fund, predicted the tax law would “put the U.S. on a more expensive, more dangerous, and more harmful path.” Now, American families are left bargaining with their bills while watching a future built on unlimited clean energy produced within our own borders turn as murky as the water in the Reflecting Pool.

Making American life more expensive

• Electricity bills increased 13% alone in the last year. As a result of the OBBA, electricity rates will increase by 18%, and household energy costs will increase $170 annually by 2035.

• At the same time, as a result of the repeal of the Endangerment Finding, American households are also now facing $1.4 trillion in new fuel costs.

• The repeal, if it stands, is estimated to impose between $170 billion and $500 billion in health harms and $1.5 and $4.2 trillion in climate harms as extreme weather intensifies in the next 30 years.

Blocking cheaper options that would bring relief

• Despite these rising costs, the Trump administration continues blocking and undermining the cheapest and fastest-to-build options — wind and solar, in particular, which made up 95% and 90%, respectively, of the new energy added to our grid the last two years.

• But the OBBA set expiration dates on the tax credits that made these additions possible. The credits will expire as demand is spiking as a result of growing needs from manufacturing and data centers. Where’s the new power going to come from to meet this demand?

• The law will cut new clean energy generating capacity by half through 2035, when we will need it most. At the same time, the administration has spent $2.5 billion to pay developers to abandon plans to build more offshore wind energy.

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Slowing economic momentum

• Since the start of 2025, funding cuts and policy shifts have led to cancellations of $32 billion and more than 48,000 anticipated manufacturing jobs.

• In the first quarter of 2026, investment in clean technology manufacturing fell for a sixth consecutive quarter, to $8 billion, its lowest level in almost three years.

• Some states have been hit particularly hard:

  • North Carolina has lost nearly 8,200 clean manufacturing jobs, worst among all states since 2025;

  • Michigan has lost more than 7,400;

  • Illinois has lost more than 4,300;

  • And Ohio has lost nearly 4,200.

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Imposing new environmental harms and health care costs

• NERC’s 2026 Summer Reliability Assessment shows that the addition of solar energy and battery resources is strengthening grid reliability. But the Trump administration has villainized clean energy and championed coal. The administration has illegally ordered six aging coal plants to operate past their retirement dates, ordered the Department of Defense to buy coal power, announced over $1 billion to prop up aging plants and build new ones, opened up 13 million acres of federal lands to coal mining, given out free passes to pollute to 71 coal plants and more.

• According to EPA data, mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants rose by 9% last year compared with 2024.

• EPA also data shows alarming spikes in health-harming pollution levels in 2025, reversing decades of improvement.

Where does the country go from here? For America’s competitiveness and prosperity, while reducing its climate pollution, the only path forward is a swift and urgent transition to abundant clean energy. All the Trump administration has shown it can do is take us backward, and all the OBBA has done is create a whole new mess that has to be cleaned up.

Next week, we’ll break down the big mess of a year that’s followed the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. Here are a few stories from this week that show how the administration is imposing new costs on millions of families — more pollution, higher electricity bills — at a time when the price of everything is a top concern.

EARLIER THIS WEEK: After a third deal, The New York Times reported “the government has so far spent roughly $2.5 billion to get companies to terminate their offshore wind leases.” The projects would have generated enough power for at least 4.4 million homes.

Stories from the States

All for nothing in Washington

To hear the Trump administration talk about it, there’s no way to keep the lights on without coal-burning power plants. It’s how they’ve tried to justify overriding local plans and ordering six different plants across the country now to skip scheduled retirements and stay operational more or less until they say so.

The Energy Department has never done this before. And new data show the plants aren’t nearly as necessary as they’re claiming.

In fact, the plants that have reported their output to the Energy Information Administration have produced 65% less power than during the same period a year ago.

A few of them are just sitting there. “One ran for a two-week stretch,” UtilityDive reported, “and one hasn’t operated at all.” The CEO of the company that owns it said on a recent earnings call, “Our expectation is that it likely will not run.”

“These coal mandates are increasingly being exposed for what they are: wasteful charades that leave families and businesses holding the bag,” Ted Kelly, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

Because, even though the plants are barely being used, the companies that own them are facing mounting costs to comply with the arguably illegal “emergency” orders. The costs to keep one plant in Michigan open have surpassed $180 million, which the utility is passing down to its customers in 11 states.

But the company that owns the plant in Washington that isn’t running and isn’t likely to doesn’t appear to know what it’s going to do. It’s looking at $43 million in costs, the Washington State Standard reported, but it has no customers and doesn’t expect to sell any coal power because it’s deeply uncompetitive.

So far, it hasn’t been able to find any other utilities willing to share the costs of compliance that keep piling up in exchange for exactly nothing.

‘More harm and higher costs’ in California

The Clean Air Act allows the state to set its own pollution standards for cars and trucks that are more protective than federal ones. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have granted these exemptions for more than 50 years to a state where there are both more cars and trucks and more people than anywhere else in the country.

All of a sudden, though, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Lee Zeldin tried to reclassify these exemptions so that they could be challenged through a congressional review process and, potentially, overturned. Essentially, the EPA appears to be maneuvering to override the state’s clear authority to force it to allow more pollution to come out of the tailpipes of millions of vehicles.

How that would help make America healthy again is anyone’s guess. But it would also potentially add to the cost of living in all kinds of ways when that is the last thing most families need, Katelyn Roedner Sutter, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund in California, explained in a statement.

“California’s clean vehicles standards save thousands of lives, protect people from soot and smog that puts them at risk for serious health problems, save money, and reduce the climate pollution that contributes to threats ranging from deadly wildfires to soaring insurance costs. The Trump administration’s efforts to undermine these vital safeguards will only mean more harm and higher costs in California.”

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Department of Delay

Speaking of blocking production: In another unexplained break from routine, the Department of Defense has been sitting on national security reviews for more than 100 wind energy projects in 25 states.

The projects could generate enough power for millions of homes every year, and they represent $47 billion in investment and 120,000 jobs. But the DoD “has not offered any meaningful explanation for halting legally mandated national security reviews, nor has it offered a timeline for when reviews will resume.”

At the same time, President Trump ordered the DoD to secure long-term purchasing agreements with coal plants to power military bases. “We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now,” he said earlier this year.

Eight environmental groups filed a brief last week to compel a court to order an end to the freeze. “The Department of Defense is misusing a critical review process to block an enormous amount of clean, affordable power from connecting to the grid,” Kelly said, “just as Americans are struggling with rising electricity bills.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright kicked off the week inadvertently slamming the Trump administration’s handling of the economy, saying in a press conference early Monday, “As you grow production of energy, prices go down.”

And when you don’t?

Because what the Trump administration has done is block production of the cheapest and fastest-to-build energy sources we have.

Sure enough, household electricity prices have gone up by 18%.

Last week, the administration once again chose not to grow production of energy, spending $765 million more in public money instead to pay a private company to abandon wind projects it had planned to build off the shore of California, Maine and New York.

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It’s done this three times now. After going 0 for 5 in court last year trying to keep offshore wind projects that were under construction from being completed, the administration started paying companies to walk away from projects before they even got going. (The first of these deals is being challenged in court.) These reversals aren’t simply one-for-one, this kind of energy-for-that kind swaps, one policy expert explained to The Associated Press. The location of the source matters to ensure power is delivered where it’s needed most.

In all, The New York Times reported, “the government has so far spent roughly $2.5 billion to get companies to terminate their offshore wind leases.” The projects would have generated enough power for at least 4.4 million homes.

Instead of growing the production of the kinds of energy that will lower costs — and lower the amount of pollution that threatens people’s health and safety — this administration keeps expecting the American people to subsidize its fossilized ideas. During a blustery cold snap this winter, for example, a still-under-construction wind project off the coast of Massachusetts was generating so much power that it saved customers more than $2 million a day that they would have had to spend on costly natural gas.

And it was one of the five the Trump administration tried and failed to keep from being completed.

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It’s also spent the past year and a half issuing executive orders preemptively banning wind projects, tying up hundreds of permits and canceling grants for other sources of clean energy that were already in progress. The so-called One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act — signed into law a year ago next week — also made it harder to build new clean energy going forward by slashing the timeline by which developers can qualify for certain tax credits.

For now, while the solar and wind projects that have managed to avoid the administration’s attacks have made up the overwhelming percentage of new energy added to the grid the last two years, the credits that enabled them are expiring soon — right when data centers are expected to double the amount of power they use in the next few years.

“JUNETEENTH IS ROOTED IN COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL, in the ways that newly freed Black communities built systems of care when none existed for them,” Dr. Margot Brown, the senior vice president for equity and justice at Environmental Defense Fund, wrote this week in The Washington Informer.

Brown took the opportunity of the holiday — which celebrates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to deliver the order of emancipation and free the last people still being held in slavery after the end of the Civil War — to undertake “the deeper kind of reflection” 2026 calls for, she writes:

“I have found myself paying closer attention to how the changing climate is shaping our daily lives, and asking who gets to live safely, who has access to resources, and whose communities are allowed to thrive. I have come to the quick conclusion that climate justice is not separate from the fight for Black freedom; it is part of it.”

This week, then, we’re featuring stories — one from Milwaukee, and one from Houston — that show how two Black communities are building their own systems of care and bringing the two fights together.

Note: We’re also trying something new this week. Going forward, The Work on Fridays will be a quicker read, meant to help you make sense of the most pressing national environment and energy stories. We’ll start sending the opening arguments, if you will, on their own — and, if all goes well, featuring more and more bylines — on Tuesdays. If you’ve got thoughts, please let me hear ‘em.

Tabs to Add

Solar beat coal on the U.S. grid in May — a new milestone | Canary Media

Trump administration backs off plan to end ocean monitoring | The New York Times

Trump pays $765 million to kill four more offshore wind leases | Heatmap

Environmental groups back lawsuit against Department of Defense freeze on wind energy projects | Environmental Defense Fund

Stories from the States

Wisconsin

Lindsay Heights was a stop on the Underground Railroad before it grew into one of Milwaukee’s proudest Black communities.

But the ugly, racist policies that forcibly reshaped so many American cities in the 20th century — redlining, segregation and so-called “urban renewal” among them — came for Lindsay Heights, too. The construction of Interstate 43 caused the demolition of 1,500 homes and 250 businesses and continues to deliver constant noise and harmful air pollution, which climate change is making worse.

Now, Milwaukee has the highest rate of asthma-related ER trips in the country. Lindsay Heights itself ranks in the 95th percentile nationally for pollution sources, according to the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index — and, not incidentally, has the worst child and maternal health outcomes in the entire state.

A new film directed by Ben Ulrich, a communications specialist with Environmental Defense Fund, explores how the community has come together to form an organization that’s reshaping Lindsay Heights all over again. So far, Walnut Way has rebuilt 100 homes, cleared vacant lots, supplied community gardens with rain barrels and partnered with a nonprofit that installed a network of monitors that allow residents to track air quality and use the data to advocate for themselves at City Hall. And they’re just getting started.

Lavondra Graham, the chair of Walnut Way’s board, has been working in Lindsay Heights since she was in her 20s. “This is my neighborhood, and I know what it used to be,” she says, “and what it could be again.”

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Texas

It’s fitting to end this week back in Texas. Houston’s Fifth Ward was once home to the city’s Black Wall Street on Lyons Avenue and was the birthplace of the formidable Barbara Jordan, the first Black person to serve in the state senate before being elected to Congress.

But some of the same injustices Lindsay Heights is fighting were done as well to Fifth Ward. In the 1930s, the community was redlined by the federal government, falsely labeled “hazardous” for investment, starving families of homeownership and generational wealth.

Redlining is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If government maps identify a community solely because of the demographics of its residents as “hazardous,” the actual hazards aren’t far behind. In Fifth Ward, because Houston lacks zoning regulations, too, they took the form of dirty freeways, concrete-batch plants, metal recyclers, warehouses served around the clock by diesel-burning trucks.

Sure enough, childhood asthma rates have spiked nearly twice as high in Fifth Ward as other communities in Houston. At the same time, families are reckoning with the fallout of decades of exposure to cancer-causing creosote, which seeped into a plume underground from a nearby railyard.

Still, they’ve had a hard time getting decision-makers to listen. So, as Dr. Denae King, the associate director of the Robert D. Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, writes in a recent essay, “Community leaders spearheaded a project to install their own air monitors to gather data to back up what they already know: that the air outside their homes, schools and houses of worship is dirty, and it’s harming the health of their residents.”

That community-driven project — one of the first of its kind in Texas — led the state environmental agency to install its own regulatory-grade air monitors, which are powerful and precise enough to collect the official data decision-makers at every level of government can’t ignore.

Even as the Trump administration weakens protections for the air pollutants that have caused such harm in Fifth Ward, the monitors serve as a kind of bulwark, King wrote. “It’s an important step toward Houston families having the information needed to continue their advocacy for healthy, safe communities, free from the burdens of toxic pollution.”

TIM TRUDELL WAS SPEAKING AS THOUGH he believed he were predicting the future. “If we can build another couple hundred megawatts of solar, keep increasing our renewable footprint at the same time, working our way from fossil fuels,” the longtime Orlando Utilities Commission spokesperson told a local news channel back in 2021, “we’re doing what’s right for the environment, what’s right for our customers, and as a municipal utility, absolutely what’s right for our community.”

In 2026, as far as the Trump administration’s concerned, apparently, what’s right for the environment, what’s right for customers and what’s right for the community is just going to have to wait.

Last week, as the administration announced that $700 million more in public money was going to be used to fan the private embers of the coal industry, the Department of Energy ordered the OUC’s last-remaining coal-burning power plant to skip its retirement and stay open.

“Ultimately, these coal plants are scheduled to retire for a reason,” Ted Kelly, the director and lead counsel for clean energy in the U.S. at Environmental Defense Fund, said in response. “Forcing this plant to remain open past retirement will needlessly jack up electricity bills for Central Florida families and businesses, right as they’re struggling with high energy costs.”

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Oh, and the reason they’re being retired? “The whole point,” as Michigan’s attorney general put it, “was to save money.”

Instead, the Trump administration is costing people dearly. Customers in 11 states are having to bear the burden of the $180 million it’s taken so far to keep the coal plant in Michigan open, for example.

In Colorado, it’s cost at least $20 million, and the plant hasn’t been needed. In Indiana, it could cost more than $1 billion — mostly because the order applies to a plant that has been in disrepair for months.

It should be obvious, then, that fossil fuels like coal aren’t cheap. “The OUC’s own financial statements show that coal costs more than its other sources of fuel,” Craig Pittman wrote in the Florida Phoenix. “You can see why the OUC wanted to switch, but now it can’t.”

At the same time, an overreliance on natural gas in the state has pushed electricity prices higher than in many other parts of the country. Recent polling found that 82% of the state’s residents are frustrated. Now, with summer heat blistering, residents are suddenly facing more harmful pollution, more toxic coal ash waste and more costs showing up on their monthly bills for no good reason. Dawn Shirreffs, the state director of Florida with Environmental Defense Fund, did the math. “If central Florida customers end up being required to pick up the full cost of the order,” she said, “it could cost every household $20 a month extra, based on comparable data. That isn’t nothing.”

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The 2026 World Cup could be the hottest yet | Yale Climate Connections

Trump just gutted a major line of oceanic defense | The Bulwark

Alright, Xavier Becerra. Prove us wrong. | Climate-Colored Goggles

‘Into thin air’

The Trump administration is forcing coal plants to stay open, but letting natural gas go to waste. More than $5.5 billion worth of gas that people could be using to power their homes and businesses has been intentionally vented and flared and allowed to leak into the atmosphere for more than a year now.

That’s not exactly efficient.

This week, Environmental Defense Fund filed a lawsuit to compel a review of the administration’s decision to weaken the standards that could have been preventing all this waste this whole time.

Established in 2024, with buy-in by and large from the oil and gas industry, the standards started limiting how much methane, which is the primary component of natural gas, enters the atmosphere, where it’s worse than useless: methane is responsible for more than a third of the overheating that climate change is already bringing down on us.

That is to say it’s a big part of the reason why home insurance premiums and electricity prices are snowballing on us, too. There had to have been more than a few households that could have used all this wasted energy. “As consumers around the world tighten their belts in the face of rising inflation and energy prices,” Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense Fund, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “the global oil and gas industry is letting enough natural gas to power Japan, South Korea and Australia for a year escape — literally — into thin air.”

Endangerment season

The cruelty of another hurricane season starting is that many people who’ve survived disasters in the past haven’t been able to get back to where they were before. They’re still rebuilding, still recovering.

Their bodies, to borrow a phrase, are still keeping score.

As we detailed a few weeks ago, though, the Trump administration has added even more uncertainty to this hurricane season. While repealing the Endangerment Finding, the administration has also been keeping disaster resources from communities, politicizing the aid process and leaving the entire country less informed and less prepared. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is facing this hurricane season with its smallest disaster workforce since 2021, Sarah Henshaw, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, told me.

But the impacts of climate change are only looming larger. Faye Ku knows that all too well. She was living in an apartment in Houston that started taking on water during Hurricane Beryl. Without electricity to power an air-conditioning unit, she feared the inevitable bloom of black mold, and ultimately made the decision to move with her son, taking on debt she’s still trying to repay.

This is her story:

SO MANY OF LINDA ROBLES’ LOVED ONES have died from exposure to forever chemicals she’s started holding car washes to help raise money for the funerals.

This week, Robles flew from her home in Tucson, Arizona, to Washington, D.C., to join a group of parents, veterans and advocates to make sure Congress doesn’t weaken a law that’s keeping it from happening to anyone else.

Ten years ago, a bipartisan agreement was reached to strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. (Say, “TOSS-kah.”) The earlier version of the law allowed new chemicals to be used in everyday products without requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to determine they were likely safe. But the chemical industry is pressuring Congress now to take us backward again and weaken TSCA to lowball the risks we face and tamper with protections put in place for children, people who are pregnant and who work and live around the facilities where these chemicals pose the most serious threats.

The risks are real.

In 2024, Jess Conard was living in East Palestine, Ohio, in what she calls her “dream home” with her husband and sons when one of Norfolk Southern’s trains derailed and its cars started leaking hazardous chemicals into the air, water and soil. Soon, dozens of emergency agencies descended on the scene. Fearing an explosion, officials decided to vent and burn off the vinyl chloride, which created an acrid plume of smoke that loomed for days. People who lived as far as 2 miles away were ordered to evacuate.

Now, for Conard, the clatter of trains that still roll through East Palestine has been replaced by the worrisome rattle in her sons’ chests when they’re trying to catch their breath.

She joined Robles this week, too, because she knows the last thing communities need is fewer protections in the face of chemicals that can change people’s lives forever. “We talk a lot about the health issues, the environmental issues, but we don’t talk about the displaced emotional geography,” she told The Work.

“I was married for 17 years, and now I’m divorced, estranged from many family members, and I live in a new home, a new city. My career changed. Nothing about my life has been the same. The phrase that resonates with me is that the train derailment was preventable. The vent and burn was not necessary, just like weakening TSCA is not necessary, and Congress can prevent it.”

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In case you missed it, read last week’s edition.

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Trump administration issues another illegal mandate to keep Orlando-area coal plant open past retirement | Environmental Defense Fund

Get ready for a smoky summer | Heatmap

Trump administration dismantles ambitious ocean monitoring program | PBS

Stories from the States

Ohio

A few hundred miles east of East Palestine, a plastics incinerator in Hebron, Ohio, was creating plumes of smoke of its own.

Last week, after ongoing environmental violations revealed persistent levels of a kind of air pollution that can lodge in the lungs and cause heart disease and cancer, the so-called “advanced recycling” facility notified the state environmental agency that it would be suspending operations.

“Children in the community will finally be able to play outside without the threat of breathing dirty, contaminated air,” Amanda Rowoldt, a community organizer for Moms Clean Air Force in Ohio, said. But the facility’s “record in Ohio should serve as a clear warning to communities like Eloy, Arizona, where the company is pursuing a giant plastics incinerator. These toxic enterprises are not a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Freepoint’s decision to suspend operations must be final and permanent.”

Indiana

Another industrial facility is being forced to go the other way: A coal-burning power plant in Indiana that was no longer needed and scheduled to retire has now been twice ordered by the Department of Energy to stay open — even though it’s currently broken.

Though the plant hasn’t operated in months, the utility company that owns it is stuck between the “emergency” order and the $1 billion it’s going to cost to make extensive repairs to comply. Meanwhile, the grid the Trump administration insists will fail without coal plants is “well positioned to meet power demand this summer, in large part thanks to new wind, solar and batteries,” the utility itself told regional grid operators.

But then the administration’s entire approach to coal isn’t really adding up. Yesterday, after suggesting on social media that the dirty fossil fuel was living it up in some kind of debauched “Weekend at Bernie’s” situation with its own reality show …

… the Department of Energy said it was gifting $700 million more to the industry. Ted Kelly, an expert in clean energy at Environment Defense Fund, explained why it’s such a harmful idea:

“Pouring taxpayer dollars into dirty, unreliable coal plants that bleed money is a surefire way to drive up families’ electricity bills even higher. Utilities are retiring coal plants for a reason — to save money. At a time when we need more power on the grid, doubling down on one of the most expensive, polluting energy sources is the worst possible answer.”

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New York

It’s a real paradox. Somehow, the U.S. finds itself in an energy “emergency” that’s so dire the Trump administration claims it has no choice but to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to keep coal plants burning for months on end — but it’s not so pressing the administration can’t also spend hundreds of millions of dollars to pay other companies to not build new projects.

In March, after trying and failing in court to stop five offshore wind projects that were already under construction from being completed, the Trump administration paid a company $928 million to abandon two wind projects it was planning to build off the coasts of New York and North Carolina.

At the time, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein called it “a terrible deal.”

Then, in April, the administration did it again, paying two other companies $885 million to abandon their wind projects off the coasts of California and New York and New Jersey.

Altogether, now, by my count, the Trump administration has paid nearly $2 billion to keep cheap, reliable power from at least 3.4 million homes and businesses.

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This week, seven states sued the administration, arguing that the original deal in March is illegal. Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, said, “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

NOT EVERYONE CELEBRATES HURRICANE SEASON. David Richardson, one of many people President Trump has appointed to serve as the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who’s since left, reportedly told his staff he didn’t even know the U.S. had one.

It starts every June 1. Colorado State University researchers estimate “below-normal” activity this hurricane season, though anyone who’s lived through one knows one is all it takes.

And what’s normal, anyway?

The U.S. had been hit with 403 billion-dollar climate disasters until the Trump administration stopped keeping track last spring. (It’s up to 426 now, Climate Central has found.) These disasters have touched every part of the country. And climate change is penetrating into every part of our lives. What’s different this year is that the Trump administration officially dismissed the idea that any of it is a threat to anyone’s health and safety.

In February, President Trump and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that they’d rescinded the Endangerment Finding. (A lawsuit challenging it was filed almost immediately.) Administrator Zeldin, whose hometown saw 100,000 homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy, vowed to “drive a dagger” through the Endangerment Finding, like 100-mph winds piercing your boarded-up windows with shards of your neighbor’s gutters.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA has the obligation and authority to regulate climate-altering pollution, the agency issued the Endangerment Finding, which is just what it sounds like. It’s based on mountains of scientific evidence that has only gotten stronger: the pollution that’s altering the climate is harming us, too. Our health and safety are being threatened.

This year, though, the Trump administration has gone much further than denial. What’s different this hurricane season is that the administration has been busy keeping resources from communities, politicizing the rebuilding process and leaving the entire country less informed and less prepared.

First, billions of dollars in disaster preparedness and recovery funding have been cut, cancelled, frozen and delayed, Sarah Henshaw, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, told me.

Second, even though we suffered the costliest six months of climate disasters in U.S. history last year, FEMA has been left to face this hurricane season with its smallest disaster workforce since 2021.

Third, at the same time, the administration has recommended shifting the responsibility for disaster preparedness and response onto limited state and local governments while leaving resources in such bureaucratic and legal limbo none can be sure how much federal help might be available.

Here’s hoping hurricane season itself treats us much, much more gently.

‘I think it’s a mistake’

The scale of loss alone contradicts what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has been arguing for months. It’s too expensive for New Yorkers, the governor has insisted, for the state to limit the climate pollution that’s making life more expensive.

This week, the state legislature followed her lead and voted to weaken requirements for cutting climate pollution over the next 14 potentially dangerous hurricane seasons — er, years. “I think it’s a mistake,” Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz, who represents The Bronx, said, “and I think that people down the road will pay for this dearly.”

That stands to reason, as people are already paying dearly. Nationwide, electricity prices have increased by 18% since President Trump took office after promising during his campaign that he’d cut them in half. The increase is being driven in part by the volatile cost of fossil fuels like natural gas, which surged to a four-year high this winter during a cold snap when people were trying to stay warm.

At the same time, the risks posed by extreme weather that climate pollution is making more intense are driving up the cost of home insurance. In Erie County, where Gov. Hochul was born, the average cost of insurance has increased by 35% since 2018. In Nassau County, where Administrator Zeldin grew up, it’s increased by 33%, The New York Times reported. It tends to be worst in the most disaster-prone parts of the state.

“The reality is that fossil fuels pollute the air we breathe and are more expensive and less reliable than ever,” Kate Boicourt, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund in New York, said. “Weakening our climate law prolongs this dirty, expensive cycle, and will saddle communities with higher bills and more pollution.”

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The Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcing a standard that was incentivizing oil and gas operators to stop wasting methane is creating the exact same outcome: higher bills, more pollution. Since then, more than $5.3 billion worth of natural gas and counting has vanished into thin air when demand for energy has never been higher:

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The grid is in better shape this summer. Thank solar and batteries. | Canary Media. Jeff St. John:

“The report contradicts the Trump administration’s claims that aging fossil-fueled plants are needed in order to prevent blackouts. Over the last year, the Department of Energy has forced five coal plants and one oil- and gas-fired power plant to stay online past their planned retirements, citing an energy emergency that grid experts say does not exist.”

As data centers boom, Virginians breathe the exhaust of 10,000 diesel generators | Washington Post

Less control, more toxic substances?

One thing the Trump administration has consistently delivered for the American people is more pollution. It’s clear that public health isn’t going to become a priority anytime soon. In January, Trump’s EPA said as much when it abruptly stopped considering the value of lives saved when setting pollution standards. Now, his agency’s interested only in the costs to businesses of complying.

It’s hard to conclude that businesses aren’t also being given special treatment in the partisan campaign to rewrite the Toxic Substances Control Act. After career chemical industry lobbyists were elevated into leadership roles inside EPA, the push got even stronger to influence Congress to weaken the law so chemicals could be rushed into use in everyday products before they’re determined to be safe.

But it’s a lot like listening to your 15-year-old argue that she should be allowed to drive her friends around on the weekends before she gets her license. It’ll be fine. Trust me! You’d tell her to get real.

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And that’s more or less what Theresa Watts wrote in a recent op-ed in the Las Vegas Sun. Watts, a registered nurse and assistant professor in Reno, is taking a red-eye on Monday to Washington, D.C., to tell lawmakers that more toxic substances and less control is not what most Americans want.

New polling last fall found that 92% of voters believe that safe drinking water and clean air should be public health priorities. The Toxic Substances Control Act itself is also universally popular, regardless of party affiliation, gender, race, age and education level, with 82% of Americans favoring it as it stands. Ahead of her trip across the country to show up for people’s health, Watts shared her perspective with The Work:

“I’ve seen it firsthand as a nurse working with cancer patients. This disease emotionally drains families and health care providers alike and leaves everyone physically exhausted. Patients can be left wondering: How did I get this? We never want the answer to that question to be that it was from a preventable chemical exposure. We should be able to trust that the chemicals in the products we rely on every day — our phones, our furniture, our children’s bath toys — won’t make us sick.”

Next month marks 10 years since the version of the Toxic Substances Control Act that’s now being threatened was signed into law. We’ll have updates here next week from all the activity on Capitol Hill.

PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS NEVER BEEN all that principled when it comes to sticking to a budget. As costs for the brand-new ballroom and the war mount and families across the country cancel camps and skip road trips because gas is too much, the Trump administration is allowing billions of dollars — and counting — to vanish into thin air.

For years, enough methane, which is the primary component of natural gas, to power millions of homes leaked and otherwise escaped from pipelines and oil and gas equipment into the atmosphere, where it doubles as potent climate pollution. Why let it go to waste? “Sensible methane standards protect our energy supply and contribute to climate security,” Jon Goldstein, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said recently.

In fact, more gas is lost and flared around the world than made it through the Strait of Hormuz last year, Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense Fund, wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The high cost of energy is acting as a stealth tax,” he said, but “the solutions are straightforward.”

“As consumers around the world tighten their belts, oil and gas companies should tighten valves, close hatches, replace worn and faulty equipment, ensure equipment is well maintained, end routine flaring, and track emissions to know how much gas is escaping from where. Companies must pursue rigorous emissions measurement and credible mitigation plans that treat gas waste as lost revenue.”

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The U.S. had in place such sensible standards that were incentivizing oil and gas companies to prevent methane waste, but the Trump administration threw them out. Since then, $5.2 billion worth of gas that companies could be selling and people could be using is drifting pointlessly into the atmosphere.

Not incidentally, the president’s approval rating is going in the opposite direction. New polling shows that 64% of registered voters disapprove of the way he’s handling the economy, and 69% disapprove of the way he’s handling the cost of living. His overall approval rating has never been lower. You can’t see methane, of course, but as the midterms get closer, the evidence that voters want much more than what they’re getting is impossible to miss.

Thirst trap

It’s never struck me as a particularly coherent approach to public health for the Trump administration to zero in on artificial food dyes while quietly inviting hundreds of industrial facilities to pollute the air with mercury and formaldehyde and benzene. Anyway, it didn’t get much clearer this week.

Claiming a commitment to “gold-standard science,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced his agency was proposing to drop limits for four different “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, that were on track to improve the drinking water of 100 million Americans and prevent tens of thousands of serious illnesses, The New Lede reported.

Administrator Zeldin blamed the previous administration for failing to provide enough time for public comment when first setting the limits. One would imagine, based on polling that shows more than 92% of voters believe that protecting safe drinking water and clean air should be public health priorities, the comments wouldn’t have revealed a thirst for even more risk. “PFAS are highly toxic, even at very low levels, and are linked to liver damage, cancers and other health problems for children and pregnant women,” Maria Doa, a former EPA scientist and one of my colleagues at EDF, said in a statement. “There’s nothing gold-standard about tearing down the science-based protections that help keep our drinking water safe.”

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EV fans fear new fee from Congress will drive off gas-weary buyers | USA Today

Virginia steps right up to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative roller coaster | POLITICO

Stories from the States

Michigan

Just a few days after a federal court heard arguments that the emergency order forcing a retiring coal-burning power plant in Michigan to stay open is illegal, the Trump administration extended it again.

Speaking of waste, the saga stretches to 2021, when “Michigan, the utility and the grid operator agreed on a plan to replace the plant with cheaper, cleaner and more reliable energy sources — a plan that would lower electricity costs at a time when families are feeling the strain,” Ted Kelly, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said. “Instead, the Department of Energy is throwing all those years of state and local planning out the window, forcing people to pay the price of costly coal power indefinitely.”

The price people have been forced to pay so far is $180 million — about $600,000 every day since last May — for the utility to keep the plant running. (At the same time, the Trump administration has issued similarly costly orders at retiring coal plants in three other states.) The latest extension in Michigan pushes the old plant’s streak to 444 days, just in time for more of the same high temperatures that tripped two of its units “completely offline” last summer.

Texas

The market continues to make very different decisions from the Trump administration about coal. I’ll let Canary Media’s Julian Spector explain what’s happening in Texas, for example: “For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country.”

In fact, the state’s newest coal plant has been broken since last April and isn’t expected to start running again — if it’s even needed — until 2027. Coal, as it turns out, is expensive, a reality no cartoon mascot can change.

Nationally, according to third-party research, clean energy like wind and solar passed coal in 2024. This year, for the first time in history, clean energy passed coal worldwide. That milestone happened the same day Energy Secretary Chris Wright said this. He’s coal’s last ride-or-die, I guess.

AFTER WHAT HAD TO HAVE BEEN my sixth or seventh refill of water, the bartender finally made a joke. “Delicious, isn’t it?”

The fried okra was salty, and I’d had a long day. But he wasn’t wrong.

I was having dinner in Owensboro, Kentucky, at The Miller House, which has one of the largest collections of bourbon in the state. Even though Owensboro’s on the Ohio River, the city sources its water from an underground aquifer. “Water from the river,” he said with a shudder, “is nasty.”

A century of voracious industrialization before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established will do that.

The primary ingredient in bourbon, of course, is water. And purists will say it has to be Kentucky limestone water, which achieves a pH balance and absorbs minerals that support the fermentation process and distinguish the flavor. Without the water, there is no Bourbon Country, and no one wants anyone messing with either.

But the Trump administration is letting at least three large industrial facilities mess with the entire region, and all it took was an email.

One is a decades-old coal-burning power plant just south of Owensboro. There, barges float in a tributary of the Ohio River beside dark heaps of the stuff that gets carried on rust-bitten elevators over the highway toward the plant’s solitary smokestack. The operation dominates the landscape, surrounded by family farms and one-story churches and an old cemetery I saw carved out of the woods in the shape of a comma.

The D.B. Wilson coal plant is one of the 180 industrial facilities in 38 states the Trump administration unilaterally gave passes to pollute with impunity for as long as the next two years.

Last spring, his EPA set up a special email address and encouraged at least 500 facilities to request exemptions from clean air standards that are designed only to protect people’s health, ProPublica reported based on thousands of pages of documents that Environmental Defense Fund obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. More than 70 of these facilities were already in violation of laws they’re being allowed to ignore.

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The selection process does not appear to have been especially rigorous, either. One request was sent from an iPhone: “Hello, I am a gas company looking for an exemption. How do I start?”

“It’s being absolutely abused now,” a current EPA staffer who didn’t want to be named told ProPublica, “and it couldn’t be more obvious.”

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona tried to explain as much to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin a few weeks ago.

The Wilson plant in Kentucky, for example, has the technology it needs to comply with the standards it suddenly said it can’t. The standard is meant to limit toxic air pollutants like mercury, which contaminates the soil and water and causes brain damage. Mercury even ends up in the fish people catch and eat. This part of the state ranks low nationally for overall health as it is, and few counties have less access to care. The last thing anyone needs is more exposure. But the Trump administration let the plant turn off technology it already installed.

More than 250,000 people live within a mile of the facilities that have been given these passes. If only there were someone they could email to request the same level of service from their government and get relief from all the pollution.

Mercury in retrograde

Coal-burning power plants are the single-largest source in the U.S. of mercury. Predictably, as the Trump administration has continuously championed the coal industry, mercury levels have risen in the country for the first time since 2018, The New York Times reported.

The heaviest surge — more than 160% as much — came out of another power plant just north of Owensboro on the very same river. “A tiny amount of mercury goes a long way,” a pediatrician and professor of environmental health told the Times. “The result, she said, are changes to intellectual development and behavior in children that might not be noticeable in the doctor’s office.”

At the same time, levels of two other harmful pollutants associated with coal plants are as high as they’ve been in decades, the EPA’s own data show.

The associated health costs — which can have lifelong consequences in academic achievement and learning potential — are piling on top of economic ones. The Trump administration has insisted we need coal plants to maintain a reliable electricity grid, as we detailed last week. But that’s not true. Coal equipment is unreliable, and coal is the most expensive source of energy we have. Still, the administration has overridden local plans and illegally ordered uneconomical plants in five states to stay open indefinitely past their retirements. Most have failed when demand was high or haven’t even been called on to run.

Nevertheless, it has cost $180 million — about $600,000 a day for nearly an entire year now — to keep one plant in Michigan going, costs that the utility that owns the plant is passing onto its customers in 11 states.

Today, a coalition of states and public interest groups, including Environmental Defense Fund, is in court challenging the legality of the order. You can learn more about the challenge here.

Hey, look on the bright side: The Trump administration might be refusing to do so, but the economy is clearly moving on from coal. If projections hold, Texas is on track to get more of its electricity this year from solar than coal for the first time ever, according to the Energy Information Administration. And it’s happening in a rapidly growing state where demand keeps breaking records.

Is ‘regulation’ really the burden?

The latest health protection the Trump administration is attempting to delay for two more years is a stronger pollution standard for news cars, trucks and SUVs.

The standard is meant to reduce the amount of pollutants like smog and soot that can cause heart and lung disease and premature death. The closer you live to freeways, ports, warehouses and busy roads, the worse this pollution tends to get. Delaying the standard could impose billions of dollars in new costs at a time when just about everything else — electricity bills, groceries, insurance premiums, you name it — is straining just about everyone’s budgets.

The delay also throws a wrench in automakers’ long-term plans, amid the larger regulatory uncertainty unleashed by the Trump administration. “Manufacturers are already building new cars and trucks using low-cost technologies that reduce this harmful pollution,” Peter Zalzal, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

It’s another example of the administration congratulating itself for saving Americans from the burdens of “regulation.” But the administration’s only shifting the burden away from the largest corporations to the rest of us.

Their math doesn’t add up: An analysis found that implementing these standards costs automakers less than $100 per vehicle; asthma inhalers can cost twice that without insurance. Even with insurance, an ambulance trip to the ER to treat an attack starts at about $500.

‘The wind is bullshit’

Last summer, the Trump administration also bragged openly about providing “concierge, white-glove service” for a few favored industries — the same ones the president hit up for billions of dollars in donations when he was campaigning.

But President Trump has reserved special ire for clean energy, one source of it more than others. “The wind, it sounds so wonderful,” he said, channeling the worst poets of his generation. “The wind is bullshit.”

Thus his administration issued an executive order on its first day (later struck down by a federal judge) to keep wind energy projects from being completed while finding nearly $2 billion to pay developers to cancel their own projects. Enough affordable, reliable electricity to power millions of homes — without making heat waves and sea level rise and hurricanes more extreme and pushing up insurance premiums — was paid to go away.

It didn’t make a lot of sense to North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein.

But it’s been one thing like this after another. This winter, the White House budget director illegally attempted to claw back billions of dollars in grants for clean energy projects only in states President Trump lost in 2024. The Department of Interior then set up a permitting “blockade” for hundreds of wind and solar energy projects, even on private property.

This week, Canary Media reported a new tactic, which is that wind has been upgraded from mere “bullshit” to a national security threat. The Department of Defense is now also sitting on permit applications for as many as 250 more projects, keeping much-needed megawatts from benefiting people and punishing the economy. “Such delays are costly for developers, which must continue paying to lease land and maintain grid connections as their timeline for generating power and revenue grows longer,” Kathryn Krawczyk reported. “The extra wait also puts companies at risk of missing key deadlines for securing federal tax credits — deadlines that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act shortened dramatically.”