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

As part of it’s 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 has been.

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.”

Add to your tabs

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.

Add to Your Tabs

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.”

Add to Your Tabs

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.”

LIKE TRUCK-STOP COFFEE beneath a sign that says “gourmet,” the Trump administration’s catchphrases often fail to pass the smell test. And maybe none’s further from the truth than “beautiful, clean coal.”

It’s neither. But the administration’s such an undisputed champion of the single-largest source of brain-damaging mercury pollution in the country it introduced a new cartoon mascot, Coalie. You know. For kids.

But the misleading insistence is leaving behind a heap of very serious costs — nowhere more apparent than in Michigan. The J.H. Campbell coal plant started operating three years before Bob Dylan ever went electric. The plant was one of the Great Lakes region’s most notorious polluters for decades. Because Campbell also cost more to run than it made selling electricity, the utility that owns it planned to retire it last May.

“The whole point was to save money,” the state attorney general said. Eight days before the retirement, though, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an illegal emergency order forcing Campbell to stay open — and then extended it. And extended it.

And extended it again. After nearly a year of this, the utility’s now staring at $180 million in costs, new financial filings show — costs being passed down to its customers in 11 states. “Families are getting double-billed to prop up a worn-out, polluting coal plant they don’t need and they can’t afford,” Ted Kelly, my colleague at Environmental Defense Fund, said.

Beautiful.

The Trump administration’s done the same thing at retiring coal plants in Colorado, Indiana and Washington for the same flimsy reasons. We can’t have a reliable grid without coal, the administration keeps saying, but that’s not true, either. In Washington, there’s so much power available the plant’s barely been needed. Keeping it running anyway has cost $20 million and counting.

Now, three states and a coalition of public interest groups including EDF are challenging the legality of the order in Michigan and will be in court in Washington, D.C., next week. We’ll keep updating the story here.

‘They’re going to sit empty’

These costs are being imposed on working families at a time when thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments are disappearing, too. Not incidentally, only 34% of voters approve of the way President Trump is handling the economy, a Fox News poll shows.

The administration has slowed down the clean energy industry in particular — one that had been enjoying real growth since 2021 at least. In 2026, instead, the U.S. has now lost 5,600 clean energy jobs and seen $1.4 billion in planned investments cancelled, according to a new report from Atlas Public Policy and my colleagues at EDF.

These losses come after a lousy 2025, too, which saw 39,000 clean energy jobs and more than $29 billion in investments cancelled amid the most “anemic” job growth since the pandemic. In December, for example, a new Ford factory in Kentucky that was nearly ready to start building batteries for a line of electric trucks abruptly laid off 1,600 workers.

But the Trump administration’s apparently arbitrary hostility to some kinds of cars and some sources of electricity but not others is costing communities in all kinds of ways. The factory’s original construction drove hundreds of millions of dollars in much-needed investment in one of the poorest states in the country. Bridges and ramps were rebuilt, freeways reconfigured. New transmission lines went up. Water and sewer systems were modernized. In anticipation of the population growth the factory was expected to bring, 3,000 new apartments and homes were also built. Now, one laid-off worker said, they’re “going to sit empty.”

Add to Your Tabs

Trump’s disdain for wind power creates political turbulence for Republicans in coastal Virginia | Associated Press

Trump is getting away with murdering an American industry | Heatmap

New EPA directive could weaken hundreds of chemical regulations | ProPublica

Stories from the States

Arizona

Arizona can’t seem to stop breaking records for extreme heat. There are entire summers now when the temperature simmers above 100 degrees. The electricity grid is “already under enormous pressure,” Kevin Moran, my colleague in Arizona, writes. The state’s population is growing rapidly. Data centers are multiplying. Demand for electricity could increase by almost half again in the years to come.

But the good news is that the state has “world-class solar and wind resources,” he writes, with at least 300 days of sunshine every year. State leaders have agreed it’s time to embrace the abundance and fortify the grid with clean energy, Moran writes.

The benefits go way beyond keeping the HVACs on:

“In addition to powering our homes and economy, clean energy is a powerful engine for jobs and investment. Today, more than 64,000 Arizonans work in the clean energy industry, more than half of all energy jobs statewide. For many communities, especially in rural areas, clean energy projects bring new tax revenue that helps fund schools, roads and emergency services. They also create new opportunities for farmers and landowners, who can lease part of their land for wind and solar projects, providing a reliable, drought-proof source of income. It only makes sense to unleash the opportunities that the new clean energy economy brings, not stifle them in red tape.”

A new electricity market that connects western states — which is detailed here — could end up saving the state $100 million more every year, too, allowing grid operators to plan ahead of heat waves and other extreme weather and get affordable power where it’s needed most.

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Idaho

The Farm Bill that was passed through the House of Representatives at the end of April “fails to meet the moment,” EDF’s Joanna Slaney said. As the bill moves to the Senate for deliberation, one fourth-generation farmer in Idaho laid out the stakes for the agricultural industry at large. “The U.S. lost 15,000 farms in 2025,” she writes in a new essay for Agri-Pulse. “USDA predicts that farmers will spend more than they will make from growing crops and raising livestock in 2026. As the mother of a 5-year-old, I ask myself: What kid has the American dream of taking on a mountain of debt to run a business that is likely to lose money?” What’s left out of this Farm Bill — with cuts to conservation programs to a lack of investment in research in soil health to unaddressed staff shortages at USDA who can make it all work — is what she identifies as must-haves for families like hers to thrive. That part of Idaho ranks in the 99th percentile for vulnerability to wildfires, the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index shows. Record-low snowpack in the west after an unusually warm winter will only put more pressure on water systems that have never been more strained. For 100 years, her farm has been in Lapwai. But climate change is changing things, and we need a Farm Bill that’s up to the challenge.

LEE ZELDIN SPENT THE WEEK acting as though he wished he’d been on The Apprentice.

President Trump’s “secret weapon” got combative on Capitol Hill as he defended drastic proposed cuts to the agency’s budget, picked fights with members of Congress and logged on social media later to take a few more cheap shots. All along, he bragged that his agency is showing how it’s done, protecting the environment and growing the economy. “It is not a binary choice,” he insisted.

No, it’s not. But the agency under his lead hasn’t really chosen either.

Zeldin’s EPA has weakened pollution standard after pollution standard that could have prevented thousands of premature deaths and created hundreds of billions of dollars every year in health benefits. While throwing taxpayer money at unreliable, broken coal-burning power plants, the Trump administration has taken away funding, tied up in red tape and tried to block the construction of hundreds of new energy projects that could be growing local economies and saving millions of people millions of dollars on bills.

And it’s all been done in such a hurry, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote this week for The New Yorker:

“In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the EPA’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to. The EPA has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action.”

What Administrator Zeldin appeared unwilling to say aloud at any of his committee hearings over the course of the week is that someone always ends up paying when there’s more pollution. When Hurricane Sandy swamped Long Island, where he grew up, he said at the time that he was concerned about rising sea levels. Now, he’s trying to give away the government’s authority to do much of anything about the reason sea levels are rising and repeal the Endangerment Finding — which is just what it sounds like, the science-based determination that the pollution altering the climate endangers us, too.

Getting rid of this one protection will impose up to $1.4 trillion in extra fuel costs on working families and lead to 58,000 more early deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks, my colleagues at Environmental Defense Fund found in a recent analysis. And it certainly won’t keep the Atlantic Ocean from encroaching on Administrator Zeldin’s hometown.

The American people are getting less and less environmental protection and an economy dragged down more and more by preventable pollution. That means more diseases. More destructive disasters. More loss. “This is one of those things where you shake your head and say, ‘How low can you go?’,” Christine Todd Whitman, who ran the EPA under President George W. Bush, told The New Yorker. “I mean, how much damage do you really want to do?”

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Going to waste

The Trump administration’s approach to methane, which is the primary component in natural gas, is a whole other lose-lose situation.

The U.S. wastes a lot of energy. For years, enough methane to power millions and millions of homes leaked and otherwise escaped from pipelines and oil and gas equipment into the atmosphere, where it doubles as potent climate pollution. Methane is so potent that it’s responsible for more than a quarter of the warming we’re experiencing now. Not only are we throwing power away, it’s coming back around to haunt us, making extreme weather worse, driving up insurance premiums and threatening our health and safety.

Cutting methane is the fastest way to slow warming, experts agree, and more than a few of the largest oil and gas companies supported a nationwide methane standard. (Generally, it doesn’t make a lot of business sense to let one of the things you sell vanish before anyone can buy it.) That standard was on track to recoup $1.4 billion every year, but the Trump administration threw a wrench in it last March. Since then, even though demand for electricity has never been higher, the U.S. has gone back to its bad old habit and wasted another $5 billion worth of methane, according to a new tracker that went live this week. Jon Goldstein, an associate vice president at EDF, isn’t having it:

“It is unconscionable that sky-high energy prices are forcing everyday Americans to choose between gas and groceries while the worst polluters have been given a free pass to waste more energy we could be using. Sensible methane standards protect our energy supply and contribute to climate security. Instead, the Trump administration is giving Americans 5 billion reasons — and counting — why we need those standards back now.”

‘The bigger the savings’

Those sky-high prices — and demand that’s expected to spike by 30% — have spurred the formation of new markets where western states can more easily buy, sell and trade clean electricity when and where it’s needed most. If you’re a utility operator, you can stop reading here, and we thank you for your service. If you’re not, this is what’s in it for you.

Let’s say climate change has contributed to another record-breaking, face-melting heat wave pushing temperatures in Arizona past 100 for days and days on end. Ugh, right? Your A/Cs and swamp coolers are running around the clock, the grid is straining under the surge of demand, prices are climbing.

The market that went live today connects California with parts of Oregon and Washington. The ultimate aim is to link 11 western states so that your utility in Arizona can plan ahead and stock up on all the electricity it’ll need from, say, hydropower plants in Washington, wind turbines in Colorado and solar panels in New Mexico. There’ll be less risk of blackouts, then, and electricity prices will be more stable, more affordable.

Right now, western utility operators have to wait until the last minute to hack through 38 separate agreements just to move energy around from grid to grid. The formation of the new market is like the addition of a Costco down the street. Instead of having to shop at a corner store and settle for whatever, operators will have loads of options. “The bigger the market, the bigger the savings — that’s why this market decision matters enormously,” EDF’s Alex DeGolia said. How big? It could add up to $1.2 billion every year.

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Add to Your Tabs

It’s the age of electricity and America isn’t ready | The New York Times

In Houston’s Fifth Ward, residents fight for the right to breathe | Word in Black

NOAA defends cuts to research and climate monitoring at budget hearing | Inside Climate News

Stories from the States

Arizona

Let’s stay in Arizona for a moment, where the Trump administration gave one of its no-questions-asked passes to pollute to one of the largest sources of the neurotoxin lead in the entire country. There’s no safe level of exposure to lead. But the company that owns a more-than-a-century-old copper smelter in a small desert community where one resident said “the air is bad enough as it is” asked EPA for a pass so it could avoid upgrading its equipment and installing widely available pollution-control technology. (The only other copper smelter in the U.S., in Utah, uses it.) Still, the pass was granted, The New York Times reported, without any “economic analysis or engineering study” or even “an exhaustive argument.” In fact, public records EDF obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show “not a single instance where the Trump EPA officials asked about the impacts of these poisons on the people” who live in the community, EDF’s Vickie Patton said. This week, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona wanted an explanation. “How is that legal?” he asked Administrator Zeldin. Their exchange is worth watching:

California

The Trump administration went 0 for 5 in court trying to keep offshore wind projects that were under construction from being completed. This year, even though wind is one of the cheapest sources of energy we have, the administration started to pay other developers to abandon their own projects instead. In January, the Department of Interior moved some money around to give nearly $1 billion to one company to cancel projects off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. (North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein wasn’t thrilled, slamming it as “a terrible deal for the American people.”) This week, though, the administration did it again, spending another $765 million to stop a project off the coast of New York and New Jersey and $120 million more to stop another off the coast of California. “The administration is using taxpayer funds that they really aren’t authorized to use to achieve a result that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” EDF’s Michael Colvin told California public radio. He added, “Obstructing clean energy projects is not energy dominance.”

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NEXT WEEK, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is scheduled to appear on the Hill to defend dramatic cuts to his agency. President Trump’s proposed budget calls for a 52% decrease in EPA spending next year, which is like fanning a wildfire that’s already feeding on one of the worst droughts we’ve seen. The agency’s very ability to carry out its mission of protecting human health and the environment is at stake.

Administrator Zeldin spent the past year betraying that mission. His EPA gave away free passes to more than 150 of the country’s largest industrial facilities to ignore environmental laws. It weakened standards for pollutants that cause brain damage and cancer and heart disease. It rejected the very idea that planet-warming pollution even poses a threat.

That’s the opposite of what most Americans want. New polling shows that 63% of adults think the government isn’t doing enough to protect our health and safety. Some are growing increasingly frustrated with the disconnect between what the Trump administration said it would do and what it’s actually doing. Only 35% have a positive rating of our environment, which is even lower than President Trump’s approval rating.

Administrator Zeldin’s EPA went so far as announcing that it would only consider the costs to businesses of compliance when setting pollution standards and no longer place any value on health benefits. It’s another way of saying that your life isn’t worth it. Budgets are moral documents. They reveal priorities. The one Administrator Zeldin will try to defend next week couldn’t make it clearer that our health and safety is no longer on the list.

Welcome to The Work!

I don’t know about you, but I value my life. I’ve been trying to say as much for Environmental Defense Fund for seven years, now. Before that, I was an editor at the Houston Chronicle, where I co-hosted a podcast and served on the editorial board. This summer, I wrote about the Trump administration’s scheme to throw out the Endangerment Finding, the federal government’s fundamental determination that the pollution driving climate change is harming us. By that point, I’d lived through two hurricanes and five 500-year floods in five years. I’d lived through tornadoes that caused billions of dollars of damage just a few miles from where I had to shelter in place with my daughter. It’s not easy to square these experiences with the insistence that climate change might not be so bad, after all.

It’s personal.

That’s what this newsletter is trying to say. We’re trying to connect everyone’s experiences — the bills we have to pay, the health we worry about, the families we’re trying to raise, the places that matter to us — with the climate and environmental policies and politics that get debated in Washington, D.C., and state capitals every day. It all might start there, but it ends up right in the middle of our lives. Please send me an email if you ever have a story you want to share or just want to connect. I can’t thank you enough for reading!

More American exceptionalism?

This year, clean energy met all new demand and overtook coal as the leading source of electricity in the world, according to a new third-party analysis reported by Axios.

In the U.S., though, even as electricity prices spiked and job numbers slumped, the Trump administration insisted on another kind of American exceptionalism, what one federal judge called an “arbitrary and capricious” series of actions to keep cheap wind and solar energy off public land.

With these actions alone, the administration held up enough new electricity to power 50 million homes, Canary Media reported, and caused “$905 million in sunk investment.” It’s not the first time a judge has chosen the words “arbitrary and capricious” to describe one of the Trump administration’s unlawful actions against clean energy, as Canary Media detailed:

“The ruling is the latest in a string of legal losses for the Trump administration, which in the past year has tried but failed to halt construction of offshore wind farms, freeze federal funding for electric-vehicle chargers, and cancel millions of dollars in federal grants for clean energy projects based on the states in which award winners were located.”

“This is what it looks like when ideology drives energy policy,” one editorial board wrote in January. “You cannot weaponize these things and just for political purposes put your thumb on the scale,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said. But that’s what’s happening:

“The Trump administration has been burying solar and wind projects in red tape instead of lowering costs for the American people. While officials have tried to unfairly delay and cancel clean energy projects at every turn, they have rolled out ‘concierge, white-glove service’ for coal and other polluting fossil fuels, opening millions of new acres of public land for coal mining and forcing families to pay for unreliable, expensive coal plants indefinitely.”

— Ted Kelly, EDF

For Your Tabs

Texas’ Gulf Coast has a health problem: benzene emissions are among the highest in the nation | Capital & Main

The inside story of five days that remade the Supreme Court | The New York Times

Clean energy could lower electricity costs — if the Trump administration would stop blocking it | Vital Signs

Stories from the States

Pennsylvania

After pulling Pennsylvania out of an 11-state program that was successfully cutting the amount of planet-warming pollution coming from power plants and growing regional economies, Gov. Josh Shapiro said this week that two of the state’s planet-warming, coal-burning power plants would be skipping their planned retirements, provided they pay daily fines for their ongoing violations of federal wastewater pollution standards. President Trump was quick to praise Gov. Shapiro’s decision as a win for “the fantastic people of Pennsylvania,” but they’ll be the ones who end up paying for this, too. So far, the Trump administration has prevented coal plants in four other states from retiring. When this happens, a member of the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council recently admitted, “all costs end up on ratepayers.” In Colorado, those costs have reached $20 million, even though there’s so much available electricity on the grid that the plant hasn’t been needed. In Michigan, the costs are up to $135 million with no end in sight. Who wins, then? Keeping these coal plants “on life support will not make electricity more affordable for families and businesses,” EDF’s Kelly said. “What Pennsylvanians can’t afford is an energy policy stuck in the past.”

Texas

Won’t somebody please think of the orphan oil and gas wells? Texas has 11,000 of them just sitting there, no longer producing much of anything but pollution and needing to be plugged to keep from leaking and exploding. They’re risky enough, The Texas Tribune reported, but one ranch owner has been battling a state regulatory agency that allows potentially thousands more would-be orphan wells that are producing only “a teaspoon” of oil and gas to drip along out of sight for years instead of deactivating them and dealing with the mess. The ranch owner said she has five of these essentially useless, forever hazardous wells on her property. They often leak a salty brine called “produced water” she worries is contaminating the groundwater she and her livestock drink. Faulty electricity lines at similar wells in other parts of the state have also sparked wildfires that burned more than a million acres. Other states have taken action to require their low-producing wells to be plugged, but Texas’ hands-off approach remains “widely abused,” EDF’s Adam Peltz said. “There’s no reason why the public should bear the risk.”

New York

EDF’s Kate Boicourt is a New Yorker. Now, she’s watching Gov. Kathy Hochul balk at a program that would grow the state’s economy while cutting the planet-warming pollution that’s making extreme weather more destructive. We’ll give the last word this week to Kate:

“Gov. Hochul has cited affordability concerns and federal headwinds as the reason for the changes she’s proposed to our state’s climate law. But that’s at odds with the state’s own prior analysis and other independent assessments, not to mention EDF’s. A well-designed cap-and-invest program, a centerpiece of the law, would lower costs, delivering $1,000 in net savings to 85% of New York households in the years to come and generate $13 billion in health benefits. We are already paying for our dependence on volatile fossil fuels, which have cost New Yorkers an additional $900 million in gasoline and diesel since late February. Gov. Hochul’s proposal would fundamentally weaken the law and knock these benefits off the table. New York has long been a bellwether for U.S. climate policy. We’re working hard with elected leaders to maintain the core tenets of the law. But Gov. Hochul is risking sending a troubling signal at a moment when state leadership has never been more important.”