The Trump administration says its goal is cheaper energy.
What does Lee Zeldin’s EPA rollback mean to Americans?
Lee Zeldin has announced that the Environmental Protection Agency will roll back regulations aimed at fighting climate change and pollution.
Before leaving her East Texas, Paulette Golly checks her air monitor. If the hue is green on the connected phone app, she tends to go outside and head towards her backyard garden where she grows tomatoes, squash and peppers. If it’s red, she stays inside.
Over the years she has seen respiratory illnesses hit her family one by one. Her sister died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her father fought lung disease. Her husband has it now. Golly has asthma.
Gorry, 72, lives in Beckville, a town of less than 800 people, just a miles from the Lake Martin Coal Factory, a 2.4 gigawatt facility that has been looming the area since the late 1970s.
“We all know how harmful the pollution on Lake Martin is,” Golly told USA Today, sitting inside the mustard-colored house. “The majority of people in our small community suffer from some kind of respiratory disease.”
The Luminant Generation Company, which owns the facility, did not respond to multiple requests for comments regarding Goree’s account and measures taken to reduce emissions.
Last year, the EPA said that surrounding counties, Rusk and Panora, were unable to meet air quality standards and criticised Lake Martin as a major source of information. Luminant opposed, calling the EPA’s discovery “unsupported.” The agency has confronted the analysis and reaffirmed that sufficient measures have not been taken to clean up the surrounding area.
But new federal actions could stall or even erase efforts to reduce air pollution. In April, President Donald Trump issued a declaration that delayed critical pollution rules related to mercury and particulates to 68 power plants for two years, pushing the deadline in 2029.
Regulations updated last year by the Joe Biden administration have required continuous surveillance and stricter pollution restrictions, particularly on plants that burn lignite coal, a particularly dirty fuel. Operators accused the rules of being too costly. Governors of several states sued.
A USA Today review of federal data found that many of the more than 60 power plants benefiting from the exemption are one of the worst polluters in the country, including six ranked within the nation’s top 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters since the latest latest year in 2023. Many of these companies have paid hundreds of millions of environmental fines and settlements over the last few decades.
Several contaminants from coal plants have been declining over the past decade, and experts are primarily attributable to 2012 standards for these contaminants.
Still, coal plants continue to release large amounts of mercury, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. All of these are harmful to public health.
According to an analysis by USA Today, these 68 power plants released 8% of their total mercury emissions. These disproportionate figures taking into account these plants only formed the proportion of 14,000 facilities that reported emissions in 2020, the most recent year for the EPA’s national emission inventory.
Owned by the Laminant Generation of East Texas, where Golly lives, Lake Martin is one of the facilities on the exemption list.
The plant is the sixth largest sulfur sulfur emitter in the country and the sixth largest in nitrogen oxides, according to data from the 2024 EPA Clean Air Markets program. It was also one of the largest mercury emitters in 2020, according to national emission inventory data.
Every time she sees three chimneys of plants in the distance, she finds herself thinking about the air her community is breathing, Goree said.
Golly remembers her town through images of cricket singing and fireflies illuminating the night sky. She loved being outside all the time, caring for the garden or spending time near Lake Martin, a 5,000-acre water known for its bass and catfish. But she said fewer people fishing there these days, she said. She added that there are still fewer picnics and hikes in nearby parks.
“I want to retire peacefully, quietly cleanly and quietly in my retirement year, live in freshwater to breathe and enjoy outdoor life,” she said, emphasizing that public health should be at the heart of climate policy.
“That’s my biggest concern. It’s something they can do to help the community, and they just aren’t doing that,” Golly said.
Further south of Fort Bend County, longtime resident Haley Schultz worked in the oil and gas industry for years until deep digging into motherhood and environmental studies turned her into an environmental rights advocate. She discovered she lives just 15 miles from Washington State Parish, Texas’ largest coal factory. Then her past began to make sense. Her classmates always carry inhalers.
“It felt like my heart was burning,” recalls Schultz. “Every time I had a tickle in my throat, I felt like I had a heart attack.”
Doctors diagnosed her with kotochondritis due to a non-stop cough, she said. They couldn’t say whether the contamination was responsible, but Schultz said the stimulation she felt after visiting a park near the plant was talking volume.
“It’s not natural,” she said after visiting a park near the factory. “That’s what it is.”
Find the coal plant closest to below. It includes facilities that exceed those exempted from the EPA rules.
USA Today contacted NRG Energy, which operates the WA parish factory and three other units on its exemption list. Company spokesman Anne Duhon did not directly comment on Schultz’s experience, but said that the declaration, which the company said is currently reviewing, would not have any short-term impact.
“In recent years, NRG has invested millions of dollars to install environmental technology in its facilities, and remains intact regardless of EPA rollbacks,” the email statement said.
Approximately half of the companies or parent companies operating exempt power plants have a history of environmental violations, according to a review of data compiled by nonprofit Good Jobs.
In 2006, Alabama Electric Power Company, a subsidiary of Southern Company, agreed to resolve $200 million with the federal government on alleged violations of the Clean Air Act from James H. Miller Jr. Plant. That same year, East Kentucky Power Coopalative agreed to pay more than $600 million for similar violations.
Virginia Electric Power Company, a subsidiary of Dominion Energy, which owns power plants on its exemption list, has a total of $1.2 billion in clean air law in 2003. More recently, in 2023, the Dynagy Midwest Generation “reconciliated to the disposal of coal ash that led to groundwater contamination.
After all, it can be inevitable
Coal operators have spread across 20 states in counties that are primarily reliant on Republicans, and welcomed the move.
Scott Brooks, a spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Department, which has four exempt power plants, told USA Today in an email:
Nick Comer, a spokesman for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative, said if only one of the 8,000 or more fabric bags acquires a dime-sized hole, the updated rules targeting mercury and air toxins will force the coal-fired unit to be turned off.
If resources are limited and market forces are expensive, Comer said, “This could result in the cost of exchange power and market performance penalties in the tens of millions of dollars.”
In a statement to USA Today, Southern Company said: “By extending the current deadline, we will provide additional time needed to address potential rule changes and further demonstrate compliance with current requirements.”
Coal-powered has played the American industrial revolution, but its role in the country’s energy network has dropped significantly in recent decades, from about half of the beginning of this century to just over 15% of electricity in 2024. This shift is driven not only by policy, but also by economics as the emergence of cheaper and easier to maintain energy sources. Among them is natural gas, but wind and solar are gradually increasing their contribution.
Julie McNamara, semi-policy director for the Alliance of Scientists, said the transition to renewable energy is “inevitable in the long term.”
“The Trump administration is trying to support coal plants and take all the measures of economics, public health and climate,” McNamara said.
“This could provide a little more money in the pockets of coal plant owners, but not to the communities that house these coal plants,” she said.
Hundreds of coal-fired power plants have been closed for the past few decades, many of which are scheduled to retire within the next decade, according to the latest energy information management data.
Deregulation: The overall picture
The EPA proposes extensive changes to pollution prevention standards, including reexamining national air quality standards for particulate matter. This is how agents define the level of what is considered unhealthy.
The agency also wants to rethink its greenhouse gas reporting program, which calls for the country’s largest facility to tally these emissions each year.
Whether people breathe clean air or not does not lead to the EPA completely. State and local governments play an important role as they are responsible for writing and enforcing permits. However, experts say signals from above can have downstream impacts on decision-making.
“If the message they’re getting from the EPA is all this deregulation or if these rollbacks still meet the definition of clean air and clean water laws, the audience should do nothing,” said Joseph Goffman, former assistant manager of the EPA office.
The Trump administration recently proposed a 55% reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency budget, which brings staffing to 1980s levels.
“Even if there are no budget cuts and rules remain, the administration appears to be committed to maintaining a deregulation environment, including not enforcement,” Goffman said.
When USA Today contacted the EPA for response, the agency’s media shared an unsigned email statement that the president could exempt fixed sources on reasons for national security interests or on the basis of a decision that the technology is not available.
“This is an authority that falls exclusively on the president, not the EPA,” the statement said.
However, regulators responded directly to questions submitted by USA Today and were not referred to the White House.
White House aide Taylor Rogers said in an emailed statement:
In total, the EPA has announced at least a half-dozen plans to discard or reduce rules and programs that contributed to progress in cleaning the air and curbing the impacts of climate change.
Ananya Roy, an epidemiologist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the deregulation debate is to reduce costs and the burden of regulation.
“The EPA’s mission should be to protect public health, and in this case they are not,” Roy said.
