Laughing all the way to the brink
Electricity prices are eye-popping. The Trump administration’s misguided approach to energy is making the problem worse.
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.”
Oh, and the reason they’re being retired? “The whole point,” as Michigan’s attorney general put it, “was to save money.”
Instead, the Trump administration is costing people dearly. Customers in 11 states are having to bear the burden of the $180 million it’s taken so far to keep the coal plant in Michigan open, for example.
In Colorado, it’s cost at least $20 million, and the plant hasn’t been needed. In Indiana, it could cost more than $1 billion — mostly because the order applies to a plant that has been in disrepair for months.
It should be obvious, then, that fossil fuels like coal aren’t cheap. “The OUC’s own financial statements show that coal costs more than its other sources of fuel,” Craig Pittman wrote in the Florida Phoenix. “You can see why the OUC wanted to switch, but now it can’t.”
At the same time, an overreliance on natural gas in the state has pushed electricity prices higher than in many other parts of the country. Recent polling found that 82% of the state’s residents are frustrated. Now, with summer heat blistering, residents are suddenly facing more harmful pollution, more toxic coal ash waste and more costs showing up on their monthly bills for no good reason. Dawn Shirreffs, the state director of Florida with Environmental Defense Fund, did the math. “If central Florida customers end up being required to pick up the full cost of the order,” she said, “it could cost every household $20 a month extra, based on comparable data. That isn’t nothing.”
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‘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: