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air pollution
The Real Emergency Is Dirty Air and Higher Bills While Polluters Profit
When our government makes decisions about how we get power in our communities, they are also making decisions about whose health and wealth we protect; we should not have to pay the price while corporate polluters and data centers benefit.
Nov 02, 2026
$295 million; 200,000 kids with asthma.
That’s the cost of keeping a Michigan coal plant running after it was supposed to close. Now, customers across the Midwest are being forced to pick up the tab—in more ways than one.
Last year, the US Department of Energy (DOE) declared an emergency order to force a coal plant in West Olive to remain open past its scheduled closing. In September, a federal court ruled that this move was unlawful. By ordering the plant to stay open past its planned retirement, the Trump administration made Consumers Energy pay $295 million to keep it running—the equivalent of more than $615,000 per day passed on to consumer energy bills.
Let’s make sure we all fight for a Michigan where future generations can live, work, learn, pray, and play safely in clean air.
This is a story playing out across the country: Federal decisions are keeping power plants online and putting corporate profits over public health while driving up energy costs. Since May 2025, the Trump DOE has ordered seven fossil-fuel power plants in six states to remain open past their planned retirement.
When our government makes decisions about how we get power in our communities, they are also making decisions about whose health and wealth we protect. Our families should not have to pay the price while corporate polluters and data centers benefit. The Trump administration wants you to believe in fabricated emergencies in order to pay for rising energy costs—costs largely driven by the artificial intelligence data center buildout. But the real emergency is the cost we’re paying with our health, our wallets, and our future—the kind of cost that shows up on our utility bills and in countless doctor appointments, school absences, missed work days, and hospital visits.
Power plants are a major source of pollution, releasing dangerous greenhouse emissions and hazardous air pollutants like mercury, soot, and smog. Air pollution is a public health crisis in the United States that disproportionately affects people of color, and communities of color are more likely to live near power plants, and are most vulnerable to climate impacts. The US saw more deaths from air pollution in 2021 than any other high-income country.
That’s why we spend every day fighting for the right to clean air.
For decades, we have worked to connect environmental health protection with the values that guide our lives. Through the Green Door Initiative based in Detroit, statewide Michigan Green Muslims, and with the national Clean Air for the Long Haul coalition, we work with communities to put our values into practice—greening our schools, creating air monitoring and workforce development programs, and helping families understand the real costs and injustices of the energy systems around them.
This work begins with a simple understanding that caring for the environment is inseparable from caring for one another. The air we breathe does not stop at a neighborhood boundary, and pollution does not ask what we believe or what we look like before it enters our lungs. We all share the air around us, and we have a responsibility to protect it.
Decisions made in DC can feel removed, but their consequences reach our communities. Three days after the court ruled in Michigan, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the repeal of most of its 2024 carbon standards for power plants and proposed to rescind all remaining regulations that curb power plant pollution. This is part of a larger effort by the federal government to roll back over 30 clean air and climate protections. Once again, the administration’s polluter-first agenda is prioritizing financial benefits for big business while intentionally ignoring public health harms.
Closer to home, DTE, Michigan’s largest utility, has proposed new gas plants as it plans for much higher electricity demand, and watchdogs say data centers are driving that need. Michigan customers could be left to pay for polluting power plants that leave them with blackouts to feed energy-hungry and water-thirsty data centers instead.
We must demand better. Urge the Michigan Public Service Commission to reject new gas plants and retire existing coal plants on schedule. Submit a letter on EPA’s proposal to roll back the power plant standards. Explain who you are, where you live, and why clean air is a human right for you and your family. Every story makes a difference.
Let’s make sure we all fight for a Michigan where future generations can live, work, learn, pray, and play safely in clean air. That’s something worth investing in.
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The Data Center Backlash Vs. the Worst Environmental President of All Time
If the opposition to AI data centers helps Democrats regain control of at least one chamber of Congress, could this not-in-my-backyard movement morph into a new national crusade to protect the environment?
Oct 24, 2026
President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of nearly 100 environmental protections during his first term, as tracked by The New York Times, prompted 10 national environmental groups to label him the worst environmental president of all time. Trump’s “unprecedented assault on our environment and the health of our communities,” they said in a joint statement, will force “our children [to] pay the costs of this president’s recklessness.”
Trump’s attack on the regulations that protect our air, water, and land during his second term is even more reckless. The Natural Resources Defense Council has documented at least 570 actions the current Trump administration has taken so far that “directly threaten” human health, the environment and climate. If they remain in place beyond his presidency, the pollutants and poisons they release will bedevil our children with everything from asthma to brain damage and shorten the lives of tens of thousands of adults.
There are signs that Americans across the political spectrum have had enough of this degradation, notably the growing opposition across the country to artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, a development that we have not seen since the environmental movement of the 1960s. We will know very soon how much voters care in the upcoming midterm elections if they put Democrats back in charge of at least one chamber of Congress to stand up against this administration. Otherwise, it could take years if not decades to recover from Trump’s onslaught.
No More Benefit in Cost-benefit
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now such a shell of its former self that it is no longer worthy of its name. Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has slashed the agency’s ranks to fewer than 12,500 people, roughly 30% less than when Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were in office. The combined number of scientists, engineers, data crunchers, lawyers, investigators, emergency responders, and administrative staffers generally ran between 17,000 and 18,000 from 1992 to 2012 before Republican-led budget cuts in Congress during Obama’s second term began eroding the agency.
At the same time Zeldin has cut his staff, he has continued where the first Trump administration left off, reversing President Joe Biden’s efforts to address climate change, boost renewable energy, and include environmental justice in federal policy. Zeldin’s most consequential disruption so far, however, was when he changed how the agency determines the costs and benefits of regulations. Instead of conducting standard cost-benefit analyses, which historically considered the benefits of avoiding illnesses and premature deaths, the agency now only calculates the cost to industrial polluters to cut emissions. This callous approach upends the 1997 decision by the EPA, after a long process that began during the George H. W. Bush administration, to compare the “health, welfare, ecological, and economic benefits” of Clean Air Act regulations with the cost of industry compliance and public sector implementation.
The EPA found that the cost of Clean Air Act compliance from 1970 to 1990 was $523 billion in 1990 dollars. Its median estimate of health benefits over the same two decades was $22 trillion. “First and foremost,” the report concluded, “these results indicate that the benefits of the Clean Air Act and associated control programs substantially exceeded costs.”
Since then, every administration, regardless of how hard it tried to rein in pollution, enacted regulations based on how many lives would be saved and the economic value of avoiding sickness, death, and lost productivity. Not anymore.
Pushing Fossil Fuels
The two most recent examples of Trump EPA backsliding are its repeal of the Biden administration’s limits on power plant carbon emissions and its weakening of the Biden vehicle fuel-efficiency standards.
By eliminating the power plant rule, Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright boasted that they would save the nation $310 billion by “unleashing” coal production they expect to increase by more than 10 times. Nary a word was uttered about electric power plants being the second leading source of global warming emissions, nor about the harm to public health unleashing all that coal would cause.
Any alleged savings from buying a slightly cheaper fossil-fuel vehicle would be small change compared to how much an electric vehicle owner would save in gas and maintenance costs, especially with Trump’s Iran war driving the price of gasoline to more than $4 a gallon and diesel to more than $6 a gallon.
The Biden EPA calculated that its carbon pollution standard for fossil-fuel power plants would result in $390 billion in climate and public health benefits compared with just $19 billion in compliance costs. The benefits would include avoiding as many as 1,200 premature deaths, 360,000 asthma cases, 48,000 school absences, and 57,000 lost workdays in the year 2035 alone.
Similarly, the rollback of Biden’s 50.4-miles-per-gallon standard to 34.9 mpg came with all kinds of wild claims of cost savings by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and a rare Trump administration claim of health benefits. Duffy maintained that newer gas-powered vehicles with driver-assist technology would avoid 300,000 serious injuries and save 1,900 lives.
Economists and health experts dismissed Duffy’s claims out of hand. They pointed out that the EPA itself states on its website that electric cars “must meet the same safety standards as conventional vehicles” and there is no reason why they can’t have driver-assisted technology. Moreover, any alleged savings from buying a slightly cheaper fossil-fuel vehicle would be small change compared to how much an electric vehicle owner would save in gas and maintenance costs, especially with Trump’s Iran war driving the price of gasoline to more than $4 a gallon and diesel to more than $6 a gallon.
The transportation sector is the country’s main source for carbon pollution and fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot. The Biden administration estimated that its 50.4 mpg standard, scheduled to be phased in from 2027 to 2031, would cut gasoline consumption by nearly 70 billion gallons through 2050, saving Americans more than $23 billion at the pump and preventing more than 710 million metric tons of carbon emissions. It also projected it would provide $13 billion in annual public health benefits due to improved air quality, preventing asthma and heart attacks and as many as 2,500 premature deaths in the year 2055.
Soot Standard Still Stands (For Now)
Soot, one of the nation’s leading killers, is largely out of sight and mind. While polls show Americans think the biggest health threats are guns, opioids, obesity, cancer, and heart disease, soot prematurely kills 91,000 people a year according to an August 2025 study in the journal Science Advances—more than guns and motor vehicle accidents combined.
The Biden administration finalized a rule tightening the soot standard for the transportation sector, power plants, oil and gas operations, factories, and ports that it calculated would avoid an estimated 4,500 premature deaths, 800,000 cases of asthma, and 290,000 lost workdays in 2032. That standard would have provided many other benefits for children. Studies show that soot has a demonstrable impact on children’s cognitive development, tying particulate exposure to lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and school test scores.
Amid the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Clean Air Act piece by piece, lower federal courts have thus far upheld the Biden national soot standard. But that victory may not last long. In August, lobbyists for polluting industries, including the American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Manufacturers, and the US Chamber of Commerce, petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn those rulings. And earlier this month, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and other anti-regulation, polluter-friendly think tanks filed an amicus brief in support of that effort.
Open Season on Wildlife
When it comes to water, wildlife, and wetlands, the Trump administration has turned back the clock to 1962, when Rachel Carson opened the eyes of the nation to the biological threat posed by the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her seminal book Silent Spring. Carson, a marine biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote, “To destroy the homes and food of wildlife is perhaps worse in the long run than direct killing.”
Destroying wildlife habitat is exactly what the Trump administration is encouraging.
For decades, federal law made it illegal to directly and deliberately harass, harm, or kill protected wildlife. Likewise, it has been illegal for individuals, industries, developers, loggers, and farmers to indirectly decimate species through “significant habitat modification or degradation.” The Trump administration wants to remove those prohibitions so killing an endangered species in its habitat would essentially have to be premeditated to be illegal, notwithstanding the fact that the federal government has acknowledged that the current rate of wildlife extinction “is much higher” today than in the past mainly due to habitat loss.
With two years left in Trump’s term, there is plenty of time for his administration to follow through on its scorched-earth campaign against environmental safeguards.
The administration is tearing the very concept of habitat to shreds. The latest example is the EPA proposal to protect water bodies under the Clean Water Act only if they have “surface water flowing continuously year-round,” eliminating nearly all wetlands and intermittent and ephemeral streams from federal protection. Such an ill-advised move would defy all federal water science research, particularly studies conducted during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
Wetlands sequester carbon and provide a fundamental nursery for biodiversity, a filter for pollution, and a barrier for major storms and floods. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), more than a third of threatened and endangered species live only in wetlands, and nearly half use wetlands at some point during their life cycle.
In many cases, the water feeding wetlands flows underground, invisible to the naked eye. Likewise, intermittent streams, which are mainly in the arid Southwest, run only when it rains, but they are still biologically connected to downstream rivers. According to a 2015 EPA report, “All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.”
Regardless, the Trump-packed Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that a wetland must have a continuous surface connection to a larger body of water to qualify for protection. That decision was both scientifically and economically indefensible. Healthy wetlands, which amount to less than 6% of the land in the contiguous United States, helped support 1.7 million jobs and $319 billion in sales for the commercial and recreational fishing industry in 2023, according to a NOAA report. A 2022 Resources for the Future study estimated that wetlands are worth as much as $2.9 trillion in flood mitigation alone.
Will Data-Center Opponents Lead the Charge?
With two years left in Trump’s term, there is plenty of time for his administration to follow through on its scorched-earth campaign against environmental safeguards. But the pushback against AI data centers, which increase local electricity rates, deplete water supplies, and drive residents mad with noise and dirty air, may be a sign of things to come.
According to the International Energy Agency, a typical AI data center currently uses enough electricity to light up 100,000 homes, but it says newer, bigger ones will require 20 times more. As for water use, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) estimates that a large data center can consume as much water for cooling as a town with 10,000 to 50,000 residents.
EESI also found that noise is a major problem. It reported earlier this year that high noise levels from a data center’s construction as well as its continuous operation can raise blood pressure, increase stress levels, and cause sleep deprivation.
Finally, a February study by a Harvard School of Public Health researcher found that just one gas-powered data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, was responsible for $53-$99 million in annual health damages. Echoing the findings of that study, an April study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the economic value of shortened life expectancy, primarily from being exposed to fine particulates from data center sites, costs the economy $25 billion annually.
Instead of reining in data centers, EPA Administrator Zeldin has proposed to allow them to begin construction before obtaining pollution permits and exempt data centers that generate their own electricity from acid rain emissions rules. Zeldin even wants to go so far as to release states from the Clean Air Act mandate to notify the public about data center proposals in their communities and provide a public comment period.
Meanwhile, data centers are tanking in public opinion polls, even among Republicans. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that half of US adults believe data centers are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and quality of life. The percentage of Republicans who say data centers are bad for their quality of life nearly doubled from 24% in January to 42% in September, Pew found, and 54% now say they would be uncomfortable with a new local data center. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats feel the same way.
As a result, moratoriums on new data center construction have been enacted or proposed in more than 480 municipalities across 46 states, according to the US Data Center Moratorium Tracker. Heatmap News, a climate news site, recently reported that $260 billion worth of data center projects have been cancelled so far in 2026 in response to local opposition.
Many political analysts see data centers as a top issue in the midterms. If the opposition to them helps Democrats regain control of at least one chamber of Congress, could this not-in-my-backyard movement morph into a new national crusade to protect the environment? In the 1960s, Rachel Carson’s warning—along with smog-filled cities, filthy waterways, a burning river in Cleveland, and a massive oil spill off the California coast—galvanized the public to pressure Congress and a reluctant Richard Nixon to create the EPA and enact a string of environmental laws. The midterms may provide a further indication that the public wants an end to Trump’s unparalleled assault on the environment and a government that truly protects public health.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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Trump Is Plotting With the Tech Invaders Against Ordinary People
AI data centers are suddenly intruding into thousands of communities across America, sucking up people’s land, water, electricity, and democratic control. And the president is on the data centers' side.
Oct 18, 2026
To cope with the imminent danger posed by today’s arrogant, profiteering AI billionaires, President Donald Trump says the only thing America needs is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT!”
Well, yes—let’s try to find one of those!
The president we have now is quite the opposite. Take the politically explosive issue of massive AI data centers suddenly intruding into thousands of communities across America, sucking up people’s land, water, electricity, and democratic control. Even red state MAGA conservatives are in furious rebellion against what amounts to a corporate sneak attack on millions of us.
Zeldin has also unilaterally reframed the purpose of the EPA. He’s declared making the United States “the artificial intelligence capital of the world” one of the EPA’s five central priorities. That’s not the priority of any regular person I know.
Where’s the president when we really need him? He’s plotting with the tech invaders to publicly trash those who are rebelling against the tech giants, and deploying autocrats to rig the rules to silence us opponents.
For example, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin is now decreeing there’s no need for local communities to be notified that a data center is moving in on them—nor should there be a public comment period on air pollution issues.
This means that residents’ first notice that a sprawling data center will be built next door will be the roar of bulldozers. Worse, Commissar Zeldin wants to let data center billionaires start building their acres of polluting facilities before permits are approved.
Also, this MAGA bureaucrat insists that such massive facilities be reclassified as “minor” air polluters, like a car repair shop or local laundromat.
Zeldin has also unilaterally reframed the purpose of the EPA. He’s declared making the United States “the artificial intelligence capital of the world” one of the EPA’s five central priorities.
That’s not the priority of any regular person I know. While real people are fighting data centers, this government is fighting the people.
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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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