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clean air act
Coalition Sues Trump EPA for Torching Air Pollution Standards
"The repeal of these protections will mean more asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and premature deaths," said more than two dozen environmental and health groups.
Mar 30, 2026
A coalition of more than two dozen environmental and health groups sued the Trump administration on Monday for repealing Environmental Protection Agency rules that curbed dangerous chemical pollution from coal-fired power plants.
As part of President Donald Trump's efforts to dramatically expand the use of coal, the EPA last month finalized the repeal of the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which tightened existing restrictions on the emission of mercury, lead, and other brain-damaging chemicals from power plants.
Coal emits more planet-heating carbon dioxide per unit than any other fossil fuel. Coal plants also release a slew of other chemicals that can cause numerous health complications, including asthma, lung cancer, and respiratory infections.
The EPA says coal-fired power plants are also the single largest source of airborne mercury emissions, which can impair cognitive development, especially in young children.
MATS was created in 2012 to counter these effects and proved quite successful. Within six years of its enactment by the EPA, the amount of toxic mercury being emitted into the atmosphere from energy plants had declined by 90%, according to an agency report.
The Trump EPA has not repealed MATS entirely. Instead, it has targeted amendments enacted by the Biden administration in 2024 that lowered caps on mercury emissions, as well as on other toxic chemicals such as nickel and arsenic.
The EPA has also repealed rules requiring constant monitoring of toxic chemical emissions. Instead of installing expensive systems to track their outputs 24/7, plants can revert to conducting occasional checks.
The repeal came after the administration had already given dozens of coal plants a two-year exemption from the standards last April, even though, according to the agency, 93% were already on track to meet the requirements.
According to an analysis of EPA data by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) last month, sulfur dioxide pollution from coal plants increased by 18% last year, with those exempt from the rules surging almost twice as much as those not exempt.
The lawsuit, filed in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, argues that the Trump administration's actions violate the Clean Air Act, ignore the scientific record, and endanger communities living near power plants.
The suit is backed by groups including the NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Lung Association.
"The repeal of these protections will mean more asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and premature deaths," the groups said in a statement challenging the repeal. "This administration is not just rolling back rules, it is eliminating the monitoring infrastructure needed to know what is coming out of these smokestacks in the first place."
"It is allowing coal plants to spew out more neurotoxic mercury into our air and food supply, while simultaneously keeping the communities most at risk in the dark about how serious that threat is," they said. "This is a betrayal of the EPA’s core mission.”
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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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In Gift to Big Oil Donors, Trump Stops EPA From Combating 'Most Terrible Environmental Threat in Human History'
Repealing the EPA's endangerment finding "isn’t about saving taxpayers’ money, it’s about saving an industry that has already been exposed as a permanent danger to American families," said the head of 350.org.
Feb 12, 2026
In what the Sierra Club described as an act to "formalize climate denialism as official government policy," the Trump administration announced Thursday that it has revoked the long-standing "endangerment finding" that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass regulations fighting the climate crisis.
The 2009 endangerment finding determined that the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases posed a hazard to public health and welfare by causing the planet to warm dramatically, citing overwhelming scientific evidence, which has only grown more indisputable in the nearly two decades since.
With the US Supreme Court having ruled in 2007 that the EPA could make regulations on climate change if it were deemed a health risk, this finding served as the basis for virtually every climate-related EPA regulation under the 1970 Clean Air Act, including those limiting emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, oil and gas facilities, and other sources of pollution.
The finding has been a target of the fossil fuel industry since it was reached. Under President Donald Trump, who has boasted openly of serving the fossil fuel industry in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars of financial support during his last election, they have found their hero.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has enthusiastically backed Trump's initiatives to expand oil drilling and coal mining, called the repeal of the finding "the largest deregulatory action in the history of America."
Indeed, it is expected to immediately eviscerate fuel-efficiency standards and electric vehicle requirements for cars and trucks, which are already the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the US, contributing about 1.8 billion metric tons in 2022.
While the White House has said the reduced efficiency standards will “save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” this is a drop in the ocean compared to the $87 trillion in economic disruption that a study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania estimated will come over the next 25 years as a result of increased natural disasters and sea-level rise caused by American corporations' fossil fuel outputs.
In the United States, weather disasters—exacerbated by global warming—caused $115 billion in total damages last year, the third most since tracking began in 1980, behind only 2023 and 2024. Last year had more billion-dollar disasters than any other year on record.
Anne Jellema, the executive director of the environmental group 350.org, said repealing the endangerment finding "isn’t about saving taxpayers’ money, it’s about saving an industry that has already been exposed as a permanent danger to American families."
"While the Trump administration can manipulate scientific agencies, it can never suppress the truth that ordinary people in the US and around the world are paying the real price for Big Oil’s profits: Lives are being lost, homes are being destroyed, and costs are soaring," she said.
The Trump administration does not have the last word on the endangerment finding. Climate groups, including Earthjustice, have already stated their intention to challenge the legality of the decision.
"The courts have repeatedly affirmed EPA’s obligation to clean up climate pollution," said Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen. "There is no way to reconcile EPA’s decision with the law, the science, and the reality of disasters that are hitting us harder every year."
Dillen said, "Earthjustice and our partners will see the Trump administration in court.” But it may face an uphill battle.
Though the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for the finding's creation, the current right-wing majority has rolled back its authority in recent years, most notably in 2022, when the justices limited the EPA's authority to impose emissions standards on power plants.
David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s climate program, said that "if left to stand," the rollback of the endangerment finding "will hamstring the government’s ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
“Abundant scientific evidence supports the EPA’s prior conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare," he added. "Americans feel the effects of climate change constantly, as we experience more dangerous hurricanes, furnace-like heat domes, walls of water slamming into our children’s summer camps, raging wildfires, and other extreme weather driven by greenhouse gases.”
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