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air pollution
Trump and Zeldin's Attempt to Silence Data Center Critics Won't Work
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin can do all the streamlining he wants to create a glide path for data centers; across the nation, the people know what’s in this Trojan horse.
Sep 14, 2026
The Trump administration wants to hear nothing about the public’s opposition to data center protests. Indeed, it has proposed to gut a critical portion of the Clean Air Act requiring states to notify the public about applications for air pollution permits from alleged “minor” industrial sources. Instead of those notifications and opportunities for public comments on applications remaining mandatory, they would be completely up to an individual state.
The proposal making public comments optional is one in a suite of actions proposed in recent months by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to allow unfettered construction of data centers fueled by the artificial intelligence boom.
Zeldin proposes to exempt data centers that purport to generate their own electricity from accountability for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions under the Acid Rain Program. He also proposes to let data centers start construction even before receiving pollution permits to meet the Trump administration’s goal of making the United States the “AI capital of the world.”
None of this is surprising. Zeldin continues his feckless plunge from the EPA nominee who at his Senate confirmation hearing said climate change is real to a Trump puppet who repealed the landmark finding that carbon dioxide, methane, and other global warming gases endanger public health. After that repeal, he spoke before the climate-denying Heartland Institute to “celebrate vindication” of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of federal environmental policies related to global warming.
Such accountability is precisely what Zeldin is trying to eliminate, a year and a half after pledging in his Senate confirmation hearing that the EPA would be “transparent and accountable to Congress and the public.”
Zeldin’s level of tone-deafness is rivaling that of his boss. Just as Trump’s Iraq quagmire is sabotaging his “Day One” promise to fix inflation, Zeldin’s actions are likely only to inflame the passions that have made data centers the one environmental issue uniting communities across party lines: from the bluest parts of New England and the West Coast to the reddest parts of the deep South and Midwest.
Zeldin calls data centers a “minor source” of pollution, reportedly in the same league as a gas station or a laundromat. Put that in the Trojan horse department. The World Resources Institute says that a single average data center in 2024 took up the space of 450 football fields. A current AI data center uses the power needed to light up 100,000 homes. The noise involved in the construction and the roar of operations can harm human health by raising blood pressure, stress levels, and causing sleep deprivation.
Then there’s water and air. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute says the daily water consumption of a large data center can be up to 5 million gallons, equivalent to towns of 10,000 to 50,000 people. There is growing scientific evidence that emissions of fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides from gas-fired turbines and backup diesel generators will contribute to higher rates of asthma and untold overall health costs.
A Harvard School of Public Health study said that just one data center in Virginia, which currently has the most data centers in the nation at nearly 700, is responsible for between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution and between 3.4 to 6.5 premature deaths a year in the affected area.
Author Michael Cork said his study demonstrated that “when large data centers use fossil fuel turbines for power in populated areas, even modest increases in air pollution can have real health consequences.” Cork said the findings were also important because, outside of academic efforts such as his, data center air pollution permitting is occurring “without any clear accounting of their public health costs—and that gap means health damages are systematically left out of these important decisions.”
Such accountability is precisely what Zeldin is trying to eliminate, a year and a half after pledging in his Senate confirmation hearing that the EPA would be “transparent and accountable to Congress and the public.” Actually, it is overkill. Data center developers need little help from Zeldin as they are quite successful on their own in negotiating secretly with local politicians and sealing their lips with nondisclosure agreements.
Developers promise economic development before the public can consider the environmental and energy effects and the relatively miniscule level of permanent employment for “factories” 450 football fields in size. Large data centers can employ roughly 25 to 150 permanent workers, according to Business Insider, while Brookings puts the figure at 100 to 200. Workers in data center communities see overall “little gain,” Brookings said, as area wages are unaffected while home prices rise.
The playbook is so easy to understand, the public gets it and is taking matters into its own hands. A nationwide day of action this summer against data centers claimed 142 protests in 42 states. The US Data Center Moratorium Tracker is currently showing more than 650 active or proposed local moratoriums across 44 states, especially on hyperscale projects.
The website Data Center Watch claims that the first quarter of 2026 saw a record grassroots victory of 75 data center project delays or cancellations worth $130 billion. Even in Texas, another data center behemoth, Gov. Greg Abbott has paused data center buildouts until the state can better audit grid connectivity.
Such is the rise in opposition to data centers in one’s backyard that several polls, including a new Economist/YouGov survey, are finding majority opposition by Republicans. A July Politico poll found that support for data centers among Trump voters has dropped from 45% to 34% over the past six months.
A Brookings analysis last month predicts that data centers could be an important issue in the fall midterm elections, saying, “With income inequality at record levels, billionaires maintaining close relationships with political leaders, and tech firms paying relatively low tax rates, a ‘techlash’ is building that poses substantial risks both for AI and data centers.” As an example of the critical eye that even some conservatives are casting on data centers, a Virginia Republican activist told The American Prospect Magazine: “I don’t care if President Trump is pushing it. I don’t want it. I don’t care if Biden is pushing it. It’s bad for our communities. They take our water, they take our power. They give us no jobs.”
Zeldin can do all the streamlining he wants to create a glide path for data centers. Across the nation, the people know what’s in this Trojan horse. They trust no part of it. As much as Zeldin wants to silence the public, the protests are rising to the decibels of data centers themselves.
This article was first published by MS-Now.
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Data Centers Are Spreading, But So Is Popular Resistance
The real race appears to be for tech companies to build data centers in as many communities as possible before residents can stop them.
Sep 06, 2026
These days, it seems as though there are new data centers being proposed and built everywhere.
Tech companies have long relied on these gigantic server warehouses to process massive amounts of digital data. But a race to develop AI, championed by President Donald Trump, has fed a sharp surge in construction.
The problem is, no one really wants to live near one. Three-quarters of Americans surveyed in August say they oppose data centers. That’s up from 42% a year earlier.
Data centers use up lots of land—largely in rural America. They use inordinate amounts of water for cooling, eat up power and pollute our air, and generate heat in an already-warming climate. So anyone concerned with their most basic needs—land, water, air, electricity, and the climate—is justifiably concerned about data centers.
The good news, Meyer says, is “there has been tremendous grassroots pushback and opposition to data centers in all parts of the country.”
Data centers are also physical symbols of the way in which AI companies are gambling away our economic stability.
“They are pushing to move as quickly as possible, to throw as much money at this as possible, basically offering open bribes to governments at all levels—local, state, and federal—to get these things approved and built,” Thomas Meyer, deputy political director at Food & Water Watch, told me.
Even mainstream economists are warning about a massive “AI bubble,” which could take the entire system down with it when it bursts. (South Korea, where that bubble may already be bursting, offers a real warning to the United States.)
The good news, Meyer says, is “there has been tremendous grassroots pushback and opposition to data centers in all parts of the country.” Meyer’s organization is one of hundreds that have joined the newly formed Stop Data Centers Coalition, which unites local fights against data centers in urban and rural areas across the country. Many of these struggles have enjoyed varying degrees of success.
What’s really needed is a national moratorium on data centers, as outlined in a letter to Congress signed by the coalition’s partners.
Partisan gridlock in Congress, and President Trump’s full-throated support of AI companies, stands in the way of a national ban for now. But this spring, environmental organizations defeated a bill called the “Protect American AI Act” that would have carved out environmental loopholes for data centers.
Meanwhile, activists are pushing ahead at the state and local levels.
Residents in Maine pushed legislators to pass what would have been the first state-wide moratorium on data centers earlier this year (although Governor Janet Mills vetoed the bill).
The fight against data centers fared better in New York, where state lawmakers passed a similar moratorium. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has championed AI technology, has yet to sign the bill. But in the meantime, she signed an executive order issuing a one-year pause to allow time to develop regulations. “We are still pushing her to sign that bill because it’s a bit stronger than the executive order,” said Meyer.
Meyer pointed out that more than a dozen states are considering similar moratoria, and bans have already taken effect in many local communities. “Several hundred places have enacted moratoriums of different kinds of shapes and sizes,” said Meyer—including Sarasota County in Florida, and the cities of Minneapolis and Spokane. Monterey Park, California, stands out for being the first in the nation to enact a permanent ban passed by voters.
Trump unashamedly centers industry talking points in his executive order, casting data center construction and AI technology as a “race” to be won. But the real race appears to be for tech companies to build data centers in as many communities as possible before residents can stop them.
And that’s exactly why we need a moratorium.
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Climate Crisis-Denying Trump Threatens Canada With New Tariffs Over Wildfire Smoke
"When wildfires hit America, Canada sends firefighters," said one journalist. "When wildfires hit Canada, America sends tariffs."
Jul 17, 2026
A day after a Republican senator pledged to introduce legislation sanctioning Canada for the wildfire smoke impacting various US communities this week, President Donald Trump on Friday threatened the United States' northern neighbor with new tariffs.
"We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it."
"The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result," Trump continued. "This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying."
Melanie D'Arrigo, a campaigner for single-payer healthcare in the United States, responded, "So can Canada hold US oil companies, their lobbyists, and the congresspeople they bribe for the climate crisis that increases droughts and the risk of these wildfires?"
"When Trump talks about increasing tariffs on Canada, he's talking about Americans paying more for the things they need—because the increased costs are paid by American consumers," she also stressed.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, when asked for a comment on Trump's post, a spokesperson for Canada's Embassy in Washington, DC only said Ambassador Mark Wiseman has "engaged directly with key administration and Hill officials regarding the wildfire emergency in Canada, our efforts to address it, and the impact of wildfire smoke on Canada and the US."
CBC noted that a day earlier, four Michigan Republicans in the US House of Representatives had made similar statements in a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who didn't address the missive when asked about it, but told reporters in French that "climate change is everyone's responsibility—truly everyone's—including the United States."
Big Oil-backed Trump has notably rejected scientific conclusions about the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency on the world stage and, throughout both terms, made various policy decisions that serve industry polluters—even as his own government continues to publish climate science.
While Carney has publicly embraced climate science, the Liberal leader has also recently faced criticism for "pouring fuel on the flames of the climate emergency" by "expanding tar sands and the fracked gas industry."
Meanwhile, the fires raging across Canada—and prompting air quality alerts across the US Midwest and Northwest—have spurred calls for "Nuremberg trials for Big Oil," given that the burning of fossil fuels has made the blazes more extreme and frequent.
Despite the science, Republicans on Capitol Hill seem hell-bent on strictly blaming Canadian forest management. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a key ally of Trump and the fossil fuel industry, said Thursday on the social media platform X that "I'll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity."
Replying to the post, climate reporter Kate Aronoff wrote that a "major function of this site during climate-fueled disasters now is providing a space for right-wingers to beta test increasingly insane talking points for avoiding the obvious."
More Perfect Union producer Jordan Zakarin also fired back on X, writing, "The United States sanctioning another country, much less Canada, for pollution and environmental destruction is the stuff of bad satire."
Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "How about sanctioning the companies fueling the climate crisis that’s making these fires more frequent and intense?"
Democrats in Washington, DC "should introduce a Make Polluters Pay bill that taxes oil and gas companies' record profits and uses the revenue for wildfire relief, air purifiers, and all the adaptations we need to... deal with these climate disasters they helped create," he proposed.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent who caucuses with Democrats, also took aim at Republican climate lies in a lengthy social media post on Thursday, noting that "in both the United States and Canada, this heat and drought is driving longer and more intense wildfire seasons, including the more than 800 wildfires across Canada and northern Minnesota that are currently causing dangerous levels of air pollution for at least 115 million people across 20 states."
"NO, Mr. President: Climate change is not a hoax. It is reality. And your ignorance is putting our kids and grandkids at risk in exchange for the short-term profit of your billionaire friends in Big Oil," Sanders said. "Our job: Reject President Trump's lies and take on the crisis of climate change and the greed of the fossil fuel industry by transitioning our energy system to energy efficiency and sustainable forms of power. When we do that, we cut carbon emissions, reduce energy bills, and create millions of good union jobs."
Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, charged that "blaming Canada for these wildfires is like blaming a homeowner when an arsonist sets their house on fire. Canada is choking on the same smoke we are, and sanctioning our closest ally doesn't clear a single acre of burned forest or stop the next fire from starting."
"If Republicans actually wanted to hold someone responsible, they'd go after the fossil fuel companies whose executives knew what their products were doing to the planet and buried the science anyway," she argued. "Instead, Congress is moving in the opposite direction, weighing legislation that would grant the fossil fuel industry total immunity from climate liability. And if Republicans wanted policies that actually protect their constituents' health, they'd support climate superfund bills that fund public health programs, help wildfire survivors rebuild, and prepare communities for the risks still ahead."
Moreno's bill, she added, "is a shameless attempt to make sure the blame lands anywhere but on the fossil fuel industry, and everyday Americans will pay the price for that misdirection while the companies that caused this crisis walk away untouched."
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'Climate Change Is Here': Wildfires Ignite Across Europe Following Deadly Heatwave
Blazes mobilized hundreds of firefighters over the weekend and scorched a total of 42,000 acres in Spain, France, and Portugal alone—an area two times the size of Manhattan.
Jul 05, 2026
On the heels of a deadly European heatwave, fierce fires erupted in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and France over the weekend, raising fears for a summer of extremes as the effects of the climate emergency become ever more apparent.
The blazes mobilized hundreds of firefighters and scorched a total of 42,000 acres as of Sunday in Spain, France, and Portugal alone—an area two times the size of Manhattan.
" Climate change is here, we are living the consequences and it is only the start of July," French fire service Colonel Eric Belgioino told the public, as Agence France-Presse reported.
France
Multiplication des #wildfire🔥(feux de forêt) ce dimanche en France.
Quatre foyers, dont trois hors de contrôle, sont désormais visibles simultanément depuis les satellites. À eux seuls, ils ont déjà parcouru l'équivalent d'environ 3.500 terrains de football. @zoom_earth pic.twitter.com/qpdrct7AmA
— Guillaume Jauseau (@GJauseau) July 5, 2026
One of the fires raging in the South of France forced organizers of the Tour de France to close the third stage of the race to the public on Monday, as Reuters reported.
The fire has consumed 6.18 square miles in Southern France and put two people in critical condition.
"An exceptional fire calls for exceptional measures for the tour," race director Christian Prudhomme said, according to Reuters.
As of Sunday, seven departments in France faced "very high risk” for fires, as temperatures were expected to reach highs of 100-104°F across the south, as Anadolu Agency reported.
Spain
🇪🇸 🔥 Firefighters tackle wildfires menacing Spanish tourist hotspot
Wildfires in Catalonia have burned over 2000 hectares of forest, prompting regional authorities to ask residents of 10 municipalities to stay at home, including in popular tourist hotspots such as the Platja… pic.twitter.com/Dal7mlAJlu
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 5, 2026
Across the border in Spain, a fire in Costa Brava burned through over 5,400 acres in a 48-hour period, according to AFP. The flames led to shelter-in-place or evacuation orders for nearly 50,000 people.
The Catalunya fire service said on Sunday that firefighters "worked tirelessly throughout the night to consolidate the perimeter of the La Bisbal d'Empordà forest fire, which is now stabilized."
Portugal
A large wildfire near Vouzela in central Portugal spread overnight across three municipalities, burning over 2,400 hectares, injuring six people and forcing village evacuations, with nearly 1,000 firefighters and eight aircraft deployed to tackle the blaze https://t.co/GzfxgDSGiq pic.twitter.com/v5KgKj9IPt
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 3, 2026
Another blaze ignited in Portugal's central Vouzela area on Thursday.
It burned through 30,000 acres and required the work of 1,200 firefighters before it was partially contained as of Sunday.
Greece
🇬🇷🔥 Not only are Europeans dealing with deadly heat, there is also a fire threat.
Check out this video from an overnight fire in the Oreokastro area of northern Greece.
So far, 2 factories have been destroyed, and evacuations have been ordered near Thessaloniki.
Writer:…
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 5, 2026
In Greece, two fires erupted on Saturday and Sunday.
The first, in the Oraiokastro suburb of the country's second-largest city of Thessaloniki, compelled evacuations and shelter-in-place orders when it overtook a recycling plant and released dangerous smoke into the air, The Associated Press reported.
“The smoke contains volatile organic compounds that irritate the eyes and throat, as well as carcinogenic substances such as benzene, dioxins, and furans,” Dimosthenis Sarigiannis, professor of environmental engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, told ekathimerini.com.
The inferno also damaged multiple homes and businesses, Oraiokastro Mayor Pandelis Tsakiris told the country's state broadcaster.
The second blaze ignited on Sunday west of Athens, according to AP, and 210 firefighters worked hard to control it before the sun set and firefighting planes would be grounded.
The European fires follow a heatwave that scientists said would have been "virtually impossible" without climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and spark concerns that the continent could see a devastating summer for fires.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez noted that the fire season had started one month early, according to AFP.
As fire Colonel Belgioino said: "The season is going to be long for the soldiers fighting fires. You have to help us."
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Do You Know What’s in the Air Your Children Breathe?
Nearly half of kids in the US are breathing unhealthy air; it's time for the EPA to return to its lifesaving mission of protecting their lungs.
Jun 05, 2026
Parents have a lot on their minds. I am a mom of a 3-year-old and a 7-year old and a pediatric pulmonologist. Like many other parents, I am constantly juggling the logistics of family life, school, and work. Keeping my children healthy and safe is a priority.
Food is one example. I try to ensure my children eat healthy, nutritious food that won’t make them sick or contribute to the formation of chronic disease, like some ultra-processed foods can. As the parent of a picky eater, finding healthy foods my children will actually eat can be challenging.
I know that parents do not need another thing to be concerned about. They certainly shouldn’t have to worry about the air their children breathe. But the American Lung Association’s recent “State of the Air” report found that nearly half of kids in the US are breathing unhealthy air. More specifically, the report found that 33.5 million children, or 46% of people under 18 years old in the US, live in an area that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. More than 7 million children in the United States (10% of all kids) live in a community with failing grades for all three measures studied in the report.
This is unacceptable, especially because studies show that infants, children, and teens as a group are more susceptible to the health impacts of air pollution, and that some of these harms can be lifelong. Compared with adults, infants and children breathe more air relative to their body size and they are frequently playing outside where they are exposed to outdoor air. The fact that the lungs continue to develop throughout childhood plays a role.
Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.
In the past year, there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to preventing chronic disease in children—for good reason. We all want to set our children up for the healthiest lives possible. But the conversation about chronic disease prevention must include cleaning up air pollution. Air pollution exposure in childhood can cause long-term harm by impeding lung growth, contributing to new asthma cases, causing flareups in people with asthma and other lung conditions, increasing risk of respiratory infections and more.
Air pollution can even harm children before they are born. Air pollution is linked to preterm birth, low birth weight, lower lung capacity, and other adverse birth outcomes. That means that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and childhood could even set a child up for a lifetime of poor lung health. As children grow into adulthood, breathing air pollution can cause respiratory and cardiovascular harm, asthma attacks, lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke, even early death.
So what is driving the ground-level ozone pollution and particle pollution reported on in “State of the Air?” There are many sources, but the main ones include diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources, emissions from the oil and gas industry, and wildfires. Higher temperatures can exacerbate this, as heat accelerates the production of ozone. While the US has made incredible progress in cleaning up air pollution over the past 50 years, the changing climate is making air pollution more likely to form and more difficult to clean up.
Here is more bad news: While half of the children in the US are breathing unhealthy air, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to roll back and repeal safeguards designed to reduce air pollution. In recent months, EPA announced a rule to weaken limits to protect children from mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, eliminated the standards to regulate emissions from vehicles, and delayed implementation of a rule to reduce pollution from oil and gas wells. On top of that, EPA recently decided to eliminate health-related data from its analyses of clean air measures, meaning that the costs of pollution to our kids, families, and communities will not be counted as policies are rolled back.
This is particularly upsetting, as I see what an impact air pollution can have on children and families in my day-to-day work as a pediatric pulmonologist. For decades, EPA has calculated the costs of air pollution to the health and livelihood of people, including asthma attacks and premature deaths. EPA is still including the cost to industry in their economic analyses, which means it will be easier to achieve further rollbacks of regulations while omitting the devastating costs to children and communities. Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.
The good news is that federal clean air protections work when they are enforced. The Clean Air Act is regarded as one of the most successful public health laws in US history. For 55 years, it has protected children, families, and communities from harmful pollution and driven innovation toward a cleaner, healthier future. The Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority and responsibility to assess and clean up air pollution from vehicles, power plants, and industries across the nation. We rely on EPA to protect our lungs. I urge EPA to return to its lifesaving mission of protecting human health by reducing deadly air pollution instead of allowing more of it, and value people’s lives and the health costs of pollution in their rulemaking processes.
As I read the labels on foods, buckle my sons into their car seats, and put their helmets on before they jump onto scooters and bikes, I also check the air quality on my phone. I teach my patients and their parents to do the same. But there is only so much I—or any parent—can do to protect my kids from air pollution.
EPA must protect our air and value our kids’ health. All lungs, especially little lungs, are counting on it.
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Zero Waste Doesn’t Work Without Environmental Justice
As the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution.
Mar 30, 2026
Zero waste is often framed as an idealistic goal: a world without trash, pollution, or environmental harm. But like aiming for zero traffic fatalities or zero preventable diseases, zero waste isn’t about perfection; it’s about striving for measurable improvement. At its core, zero waste asks us to rethink how we produce, consume, and conserve our resources as well as how we dispose of our waste. Because right now, that waste does end up somewhere, and too often that somewhere is in Black, Indigenous, and brown communities.
Zero waste is about generating little to no waste through strategies such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others. Not only do these strategies support the reduction of waste, but they also lead to more resilient cities and communities, social equity, and healthier environments.
Although the zero waste movement has grown substantially in recent decades, it continues to be challenged (rightfully so) by those who see it developing into the next “organics” movement—a movement that once prioritized providing healthier food options only to those who can afford them at a premium. Thus, leaving many communities (mostly Indigenous, Black, and brown) without options for fresh food produced with increased standards and no added synthetic substances.
But similar to the organics movement, zero waste concepts have been around for generations and are deeply rooted in various cultures around the world. The irony is that these same communities being left out are the ones that have the greatest ancestral knowledge associated with producing organic food through their generational fights against colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions.
Historically, Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples have acted as stewards of our natural environment, but have been the most impacted by pollution. Policies like redlining have further concentrated polluting facilities, including waste facilities, in Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. In the United States specifically, the environmental justice (EJ) movement was birthed through various industrial fights against the siting of landfills and incinerators in mostly Black and brown communities.
Since 1982, the small community of Afton, located in Warren County, North Carolina, has often been referred to as one of the birthplaces of the environmental justice movement, as the local community fought against a new hazardous waste landfill. This low-income, rural, and majority Black community became responsible for the first arrests in US history over the siting of a landfill. Unfortunately, the people of Warren County lost the battle, but many considered this to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.
It wasn’t just the community of Afton fighting against the siting of waste infrastructure. Indigenous, Black, and brown communities across the country were being inundated with industrial and toxic waste zoning, and the federal government knew this. In fact, this pattern was confirmed by a 1983 analysis by the US General Accounting Office, which concluded that most commercial waste treatment plants or waste dumps were more likely to be found near Black communities than near white communities.
These industries know these communities lack the resources and capacity to fight back to protect themselves. They even developed whole reports on this topic. The 1984 “Cerrell Report” was a document commissioned by the California Waste Management Board, which advised that waste incinerators be sited in low-income, rural, and Black and brown communities solely because these areas were deemed to have the least political resistance and capacity to oppose industrial projects. These communities are most impacted by waste policies and are often targeted by the waste industry for further development. The end result of this is decades of underinvestment, coupled with extreme health disparities and negative social impacts.
The communities most impacted by the waste crisis are also leading the way toward solutions. Across the country, communities are composting, reusing, and practicing zero waste as acts of resistance against systems that profit from landfills, incinerators, and other polluting facilities.
After more than a 30-year fight, community activists in Detroit finally shut down the city's incinerator in 2019. The facility was referred to as a “bad neighbor” due to it being a major source of air pollution, emitting pollutants like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, mercury, and cadmium throughout the surrounding communities. Recognizing local legislators believed the incinerator was the best way to handle the city’s waste, local activists took it upon themselves to develop a backyard community composting program to show not only that zero waste was possible in Detroit, but that community members wanted it and had bought into this idea.
Seven years later, the City of Detroit’s Office of Sustainability launched its first-ever Community Compost Pilot Program with a goal of diverting over 80,000 pounds annually of food waste from landfills and incinerators. If it weren’t for the initial efforts from community members, the City of Detroit would likely still be burning its trash to this day.
And, it's not just Detroit. Activists in California closed down the last two incinerators in the state in favor of developing new zero waste policies. Specifically, they targeted the vast amount of public tax subsidies that were being used to prop up the incinerator industry, as incinerators are incredibly inefficient and expensive to operate. Instead, that money is now being directed toward real zero waste solutions such as waste reduction, composting, recycling, and industrial redesign, among others.
In addition to closing the facilities of the past, EJ communities have now begun influencing the facilities of the future through the development of new statewide landfill methane regulations. The states of California and Colorado have both recently updated their landfill methane regulations to include stronger protections for vulnerable communities and higher accountability for the waste sector. Many of these recommendations came directly from EJ communities suffering the most from the impacts of landfills.
This is only a small snapshot of the hundreds of communities across the country working to demonstrate that community-led zero waste strategies can reduce emissions, reduce waste, and reduce harm. From Louisiana to Oregon, from Maine all the way to California… Practical solutions to our waste and climate crisis already exist, and as the zero waste movement continues to grow, it must center environmental justice and the communities who have had to bear the greatest burden of pollution, too often for generations.
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Trump's Environmental Massacre
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up.
Mar 14, 2026
Last March, I interviewed staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago who were horrified by the Trump administration’s staff and funding cuts, which notably included eliminating environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The threat of those cuts was so severe that Brian Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based in Michigan, predicted: “People will die. There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
How many additional deaths? The Trump EPA will not say. As part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to destroy federal science and roll back environmental safeguards, his EPA announced recently that it will no longer consider the monetary value of saving lives by regulating fine particulate matter, commonly called soot, smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM 2.5) and ozone smog from vehicles, fossil-fuel-burning power plants, and other polluting industries.
In other words, the agency intends to conduct cost-benefit analyses by only considering the cost.
We Need Stronger Pollution Regs
The data documenting soot’s deadly damage even with environmental rules in place is voluminous, much coming from the federal government itself, suggesting that we need stronger regulations, not weaker ones.
A 1997 EPA report found the first 20 years of the 1970 Clean Air Act were so effective that 205,000 premature deaths were avoided from all air pollution sources in 1990. The same report concluded that the 1990 amendments to the law would save more than 230,000 lives a year by 2020 and prevent 2.4 million asthma attacks.
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal.
Even so, air pollution remains mortally high in a nation that is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas and stubbornly prioritizes individually owned vehicles over public transportation. A 2021 study funded by the EPA and published in the journal Science Advances found that PM 2.5 alone still accounts for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year.
The conclusions of nongovernmental studies echo the EPA’s own findings. A 2022 University of Wisconsin study, for example, estimated that if the United States eliminated all fine particulate, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions from electricity generation, vehicles, factories, and buildings, 53,200 premature deaths a year could be prevented, providing $600 billion in health benefits from avoided illness and mortality.
Drill Baby Drill’s Collateral Damage
The Trump EPA’s recent announcement is just another of a string of nonsensical—and dangerous—moves by the agency. They include abandoning the Paris Climate Accord and killing the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” determining that carbon pollution threatens human health, which the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) estimates will cut short the lives of as many as 58,000 people over the next 30 years due to additional pollution.
Taken together, the Trump administration’s assault on public health has the potential of triggering an environmental massacre, particularly among the most vulnerable Americans.
Because of our nation’s history of housing discrimination, communities of color, regardless of income, face more than twice the risk of exposure to PM 2.5 than white communities. According to the 2021 Sciences Advances study, this “phenomenon is systemic, holding for nearly all major sectors, as well as across states and urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels…. Targeting locally important sources for mitigation could be one way to counter this persistence.”
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal. An August 2025 Science Advances study found that the life cycle of oil and gas extraction, storage, transporting, refining, and combustion results in 91,000 annual premature deaths due to exposure to PM 2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone. It found that, with rare exception, “Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American groups experience the worst exposures and burdens for all life-cycle stages and pollutants.” A 2023 New England Journal of Medicine study, meanwhile, concluded that reducing PM 2.5 pollution alone would disproportionately benefit Blacks at all income levels as well as low-income whites.
EPA Now Stands for Every Polluter’s Ally
Without a single fact to back up its claim, the Trump EPA—led by the fossil fuel industry-friendly Lee Zeldin—stated it did away with calculating lives saved because prior estimates were done with “false precision and confidence.” In fact, the agency is now simply repeating the talking points of the oil and gas industry and the US Chamber of Commerce, which has a long history of lobbying Congress to resist climate legislation and filing endless amicus briefs on behalf of polluters to counter environmental lawsuits.
In 2018, during the first the Trump administration, the chamber asserted—also with no evidence—that previous to the Trump EPA, the agency “historically misinformed and misled the public by using inconsistent and opaque analytical and communication methods regarding costs and benefits.”
That same year, the Trump EPA offered a revealing nugget of information that was hardly opaque. It admitted that its effort to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reined in power plant carbon pollution, would result in in as many as 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030, and thousands more annual cases of respiratory diseases. At the time, Trump was also trying to roll back Obama-era clean air vehicle standards that were projected to save nearly 40,000 lives a year by 2030.
In its last year in office, the Biden administration proposed tightening PM 2.5 standards, estimating that it could prevent as many as 4,500 premature deaths in 2032 and lead to $46 billion in health benefits in 2032.
There is not a single word about protecting lives or lowering healthcare costs in the EPA’s February 12 press release announcing its repeal of the endangerment finding nor in its February 20 press release hailing the repeal of tighter mercury and air toxics standards enacted by the Biden administration. Instead, Zeldin claimed—without proof—that the air pollution rules would have “destroyed reliable American energy” and revoking the endangerment finding would save Americans more than $1.3 trillion, including an average cost savings of more than $2,400 on a new vehicle.
While Zeldin is trying to use the greater availability of cheaper, gas-guzzling cars as a lure to seduce the public to look the other way on environmental regulations, the pollution they emit will smoke the nation. EDF estimates that higher-polluting vehicles could, by 2055:
- Cost US drivers as much as $1.4 trillion in increased fuel costs;
- Emit carbon pollution that will intensify climate change-related extreme weather events, costing $1.5 trillion to $4.2 trillion; and
- Increase respiratory and heart disease, as well as the number of premature deaths, costing $170 billion to $500 billion.
None of that mattered to the first Trump administration, which admitted its regulatory rollbacks could kill people. When the second Trump administration barreled into office with its cutbacks and deep-sixing of environmental justice and DEI programs, staffers in the EPA Chicago Region 5 office feared the worst. They included Kayla Butler, a Superfund community involvement coordinator. The stories her team collects in the field of people living with toxic horrors are precisely the stories she said the Trump administration is “trying to erase.”
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up. With the death toll from air pollution still so high, the Trump EPA is burying the data with the bodies, so we will never know the cause.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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MAGA Stands for Make America Gasp Again
President Donald Trump’s energy strategy is optimized for the unbreathing.
Feb 20, 2026
Gasping for air is anything but greatness. It might be called the Gilded Age, but all that gold leaf was covered in soot.
In the early 1900s, America mistook combustion for unadulterated progress. Robber barons ascended like demigods from furnace-lit boardrooms. Children disappeared into textile mills and coal shafts. Rivers ran the color of industry—blackened, metallic, iridescent. Pittsburgh was said to have glowed at night, not from benign innovation but from the orange haze of its own exhaust. Entire cities learned to live in a permanent dusk. Laundry left outside returned streaked with ash. The sun became rumor.
We eventually decided that wasn’t, in fact, greatness. We regulated, conceding that lungs weren't an expendable input in the national ledger. And yet here we are in 2026, debating whether the air is worth protecting—this time in the service of artificial intelligence.
The logic now presented as bold and patriotic by the Trump administration would be comical if it weren't so terminal: Repeal climate constraints, unshackle coal, and power the next frontier of machines with the dirtiest fuel available. The argument arrives dressed in competitiveness. We must win the AI race. We must not be outpaced by China. We must dominate the 21st century. Yet the subtext is too hard to ignore. Coal is abundant and immediate. With the right rollbacks, it won't require the patience of permitting solar arrays or the political consensus of constructing nuclear reactors. No need for AI data centers in space; coal is a perfectly good accelerant with a proven track record on Earth.
The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in.
So why not use it to animate our new artificial friends?
There's a dark absurdity in this arrangement. AI doesn't breathe. It doesn't develop asthma. It doesn't mourn coral reefs or cough through wildfire season. It experiences no diminishment when particulate matter thickens the sky. To power AI with coal is to choose an energy source that is catastrophic for biological life but irrelevant to silicon. Suffice it to say, President Donald Trump’s energy strategy is optimized for the unbreathing.
Which leads to a suspicion so grotesque it borders on satire: The only mind for whom this is rational isn't a human one. Imagine, for a moment, a system trained to maximize output and dominate competitors at any cost. Surveying the energy landscape, it concludes that clean sources are intermittent or politically contested, whereas fossil fuels are dense, reliable, and already embedded in the infrastructure. Although increased carbon emissions degrade long-term human habitability, the system’s objective function contains no intrinsic preference for breathable air. Thus, the recommendation comes easy.
Power us with coal.
The more one turns this over, the more it feels less like policy and more like an algorithmic agenda. The idea is so inhumanly stupid—so hostile to the basic conditions of life—that it almost requires a nonhuman author, for no species dependent on oxygen would deliberately foul its own supply to train faster chatbots, unless it had forgotten that oxygen is the quintessential point. To return to coal at scale isn't nostalgia; it's regression. It is to resurrect a soot-choked republic and call it strength. It is to look at an era defined by black lung and industrial carnage and say: again.
This time around, rather than power railroads and steel, coal furnaces will power vast, humming warehouses of computation, data centers with appetites for electricity (not to mention water) that are already straining grids across the country. The irony is approaching theological. We once burned coal to build the modern world; now we would burn it to build our successor—a civilization that requires fresh air choosing to empower intelligences that do not. Two birds, one coal-black stone: Accelerate machine capacity and, in the process, weaken the biological substrate that might one day resist it.
Of course, no AI is secretly drafting executive orders. And no server farm has yet staged a coup. The more unsettling truth is that we don't need malevolent, self-aware machines to make machine-aligned decisions. It seems we are capable of aligning ourselves to their incentives. We've adopted the technocratic metrics of speed, scale, and dominance, subordinating everything else to them within the Silicon Valley of the shadow of death.
If the goal is to maximize computational throughput at any cost, coal makes a brutal kind of sense, especially from an artificial perspective. However, if the goal is to preserve a livable planet for oxygen-dependent beings, it does not. The Trump administration’s denial of the harms caused by greenhouse gases reveals which objective function it has chosen to operate.
The Gilded Age was gilded precisely because it was superficial. Beneath the gold plating lay a wasteland of exploitation, environmental ruin, and lives shortened in the name of industrial production. We learned, slowly and imperfectly, that some costs were too high, that air and water are more precious than gold. To reverse that lesson now, for the sake of an AI Revolution, is to confuse power with wisdom. It is to assume that because machines can model the world, they should determine the conditions under which we inhabit it.
Make America Great Again was once a slogan about memory. Make America Gasp Again would be a policy about forgetfulness. The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in. Coal is efficient for machines. It is lethal for us. And if we can't distinguish between those two facts, then the machines need not conspire at all.
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Senate Dems Launch Investigation Into Trump EPA Policy to 'Disregard' Health Impacts of Pollution
"The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the lawmakers wrote.
Feb 15, 2026
A group of 31 Democratic senators has launched an investigation into a new Trump administration policy that they say allows the Environmental Protection Agency to "disregard" the health impacts of air pollution when passing regulations.
Plans for the policy were first reported on last month by the New York Times, which revealed that the EPA was planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries and instead focus exclusively on the costs these regulations pose to industry.
On December 11, the Times reported that the policy change was being justified based on the claim that the exact benefits of curbing these emissions were “uncertain."
"Historically, the EPA’s analytical practices often provided the public with false precision and confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone," said an email written by an EPA supervisor to his employees on December 11. “To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone.”
The group of senators, led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), rebuked this idea in a letter sent Thursday to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
"EPA’s new policy is irrational. Even where health benefits are 'uncertain,' what is certain is that they are not zero," they said. "It will lead to perverse outcomes in which EPA will reject actions that would impose relatively minor costs on polluting industries while resulting in massive benefits to public health—including in saved lives."
"It is contrary to Congress’s intent and directive as spelled out in the Clean Air Act. It is legally flawed," they continued. "The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President [Donald] Trump’s largest donors."
Research published in 2023 in the journal Science found that between 1999 and 2020, PM2.5 pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 460,000 people in the United States, making it more than twice as deadly as other kinds of fine particulate emissions.
While this is a staggering loss of life, the senators pointed out that the EPA has also been able to put a dollar value on the loss by noting quantifiable results of increased illness and death—heightened healthcare costs, missed school days, and lost labor productivity, among others.
Pointing to EPA estimates from 2024, they said that by disregarding human health effects, the agency risks costing Americans “between $22 and $46 billion in avoided morbidities and premature deaths in the year 2032."
Comparatively, they said, “the total compliance cost to industry, meanwhile, [would] be $590 million—between one and two one-hundredths of the estimated health benefit value."
They said the plan ran counter to the Clean Air Act's directive to “protect and enhance the quality of the Nation’s air resources so as to promote the public health and welfare,” and to statements made by Zeldin during his confirmation hearing, where he said "the end state of all the conversations that we might have, any regulations that might get passed, any laws that might get passed by Congress” is to “have the cleanest, healthiest air, [and] drinking water.”
The senators requested all documents related to the decision, including any information about cost-benefit modeling and communications with industry representatives.
"That EPA may no longer monetize health benefits when setting new clean air standards does not mean that those health benefits don’t exist," the senators said. "It just means that [EPA] will ignore them and reject safer standards, in favor of protecting corporate interests."
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Lancet Study Warns Plastics Could Cost Humanity 83 Million Years of Healthy Life
"Systemic change is needed 'from the cradle to the grave' of plastic production, use, and disposal," said the lead author, calling for "ambitious action from governments and industry transparency."
Jan 27, 2026
A study published Tuesday in the Lancet Planetary Health highlights how humanity's continued reliance on plastics—which are primarily derived from planet-heating fossil fuels—is expected to harm global health over the next couple of decades.
"Plastics life cycles emit a range of gases and pollutants that contribute to the global burden of disease, including greenhouse gases that drive climate change, air pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses, and hazardous chemicals associated with cancers and other noncommunicable diseases," the study explains.
"These emissions occur across all stages of the plastics value chain: from oil and gas extraction, which provides the feedstocks for more than 90% of global plastics; to polymer production and product manufacturing, global transportation, recycling, and formal or informal waste management and mismanagement; to the gradual degradation of plastics in the environment," the publication continues.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, as well as France's University of Toulouse, modeled various scenarios of plastics production, consumption, and disposal from 2016-40.
"The study is the first of its kind to assess the number of healthy years of life lost ('disability-adjusted life years' or 'DALYS'—a measure of harm) due to greenhouse gases, air pollutants, and toxic chemicals emitted across the life cycle of plastics at a global scale," according to LSHTM.
The team estimated that without any changes in global plastics policies and practices, annual health impacts would soar from 2.1 million DALYs in 2016 to 4.5 million DALYs by 2040—with a total of 83 million healthy years of life lost over the full study period. Under a business-as-usual scenario, 40% of the health harms would be tied to rising temperatures, nearly a third to air pollution, and over a quarter to toxic chemicals.
Because of limited data—particularly on the use stage of plastics and the chemicals they contain—lead author Megan Deeney of LSHTM told Agence France-Presse that "this is undoubtedly a vast underestimate of the total human health impacts."
new paper in @thelancet.com estimating the global health burdens of plasticsI think this is one of the first analyses that quantifies the impacts of plastics across its entire lifecycle (from extraction to waste) and highlights the pretty staggering health effects of our current economic system
[image or embed]
— Rob Ralston (@policyrelevant.bsky.social) January 27, 2026 at 6:54 AM
Still, the researchers were able to offer some insight into the adverse health impacts—thanks to their repurposing of modeling methods typically used to evaluate the environmental footprint of individual products and technologies.
These methods "are an increasingly important tool to tackle sustainability questions at a much larger scale," study co-author and Exeter professor Xiaoyu Yan said in a statement. "Our study shows that this approach can help uncover the massive impacts of plastics on human health throughout the life cycle. We now need urgent action to reduce the impacts of plastics on the environment and ultimately human health."
Deeney stressed that such action can't be restricted to consumers. As she put it, "Our research shows that the adverse health impacts of plastics stretch far beyond the point at which we buy a plastic product or put plastic items in a recycling bin."
In the US alone, government data suggests that just 5% of plastic waste is recycled annually, according to a Greenpeace report published last month. The advocacy group also noted that only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics are even recyclable.
"Often the blame is put on us as individual consumers of plastics to solve the problem, but while we all have an important role to play in reducing the use of plastics, our analysis shows systemic change is needed 'from the cradle to the grave' of plastic production, use, and disposal," Deeney said Tuesday. "Much more ambitious action from governments and industry transparency is needed to curb this growing global plastics public health crisis."
The lead author said that the most effective measure is slashing the production of "unnecessary" plastic. She also pointed out that lack of data doesn't just impact studies like this one: "Industry nondisclosure and inconsistent reporting of plastics' chemical composition is severely limiting the ability of life cycle assessments (LCAs) to inform effective policy to protect humans, ecosystems, and the environment."
The study comes after the latest round of global plastics treaty negotiations stalled in August—which environmentalists called an "abject failure" that should be blamed on the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, and other major governments opposed to curbing production.
"The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wake-up call for the world: Ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head-on," Greenpeace USA's Graham Forbes said at the time. "The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground."
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