As you wish
The Trump administration's efforts to work for the coal industry are only working against the rest of us.
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At the same time, the EPA repealed the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards updates, allowing coal plants to pollute more brain-damaging mercury and life-shortening soot while handing out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.
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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