SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
coal
In Yet Another Industry Handout, Trump EPA 'Just Took a Sledgehammer' to Coal Ash Rules
"Ultimately, if this rule is finalized, human health will suffer, and taxpayers will be left with the cost of cleaning up their rivers and drinking water."
Apr 09, 2026
Amid mounting calls for the removal of US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief on Thursday announced proposed changes to coal ash rules, which critics blasted as another gift to polluters at the expense of public health.
Officially called coal combustion residuals (CCR), "coal ash—the toxic byproduct of burning coal—contains hazardous pollutants, including arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, radium, and selenium, which are linked to serious health harms such as cancer, heart disease, and brain damage, among other lasting impacts," noted the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Specifically, as The Associated Press reported, the EPA "proposed easing standards for monitoring and protecting groundwater near some coal ash sites, rolling back rules forcing the cleanup of entire coal properties instead of just places where ash was dumped. The revisions would also make it easier to reuse coal ash for other purposes."
While Zeldin claimed the "commonsense changes to the CCR regulations reflect EPA's commitment to restoring American energy dominance, strengthening cooperative federalism, and accommodating unique circumstances at certain CCR facilities," Environmental Protection Network's Marc Boom responded that "letting companies avoid cleaning up waste sites that may be leaching toxic metals into groundwater and nearby waterways, while weakening protections and accountability, is not common sense."
"EPA's top priority should be protecting people's health, not sacrificing it for corporate expediency," argued Boom, senior director of public affairs at the group, which is made up of former agency staff. "EPA may call these safeguards 'impractical,' but anyone living downstream of coal ash sites holding thousands of tons of waste knows that requiring cleanup and monitoring is a necessary and basic standard."
NRDC senior attorney Becky Hammer called the pending rollback just "the latest in a long, long, line of Trump administration giveaways to fossil fuels industries," which have also included repealing EPA rules that targeted chemical pollution from coal-fired power plants, declaring a national energy emergency, and scrapping the 2009 "endangerment finding" that underpins all federal climate regulations.
Other advocacy organizations were similarly critical of Thursday's announcement. Daniel Estrin, Waterkeeper Alliance's general counsel and legal director, pointed out that "coal ash is contaminating water at nearly every active and retired coal plant in the US."
"By gutting these safeguards, EPA is abandoning its duty to protect impacted communities by allowing preventable contamination of our rivers, lakes, streams, and groundwater," he said. "The longer the coal industry is allowed to delay closing and cleaning up its toxic waste sites, the more difficult and costly it becomes to fix the damage. By failing to enforce the law, EPA is letting polluters continue harming people and wildlife without accountability."
Like Estrin and Hammer, Earthjustice senior counsel Lisa Evans framed that proposal as "yet another handout to the coal power industry at the expense of our health, water, and wallets," and warned of the dangers of delaying closure and cleanup. She said that "ultimately, if this rule is finalized, human health will suffer, and taxpayers will be left with the cost of cleaning up their rivers and drinking water."
Although "the Trump administration just took a sledgehammer to the health protections in place for toxic coal pollution," Evans added, "Earthjustice has successfully defended these safeguards in court and will do so again."
Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has secured commitments to clean up over 270 million tons of coal ash in US communities, similarly said that "doing the bidding of industrial polluters instead of protecting ordinary families and clean water is shameful, but we are ready to keep fighting against coal ash pollution."
"Letting coal-burning utilities set the agenda has been a disaster for communities across the South, resulting in coal ash spills and hundreds of families forced to live on bottled water for years under the threat of coal ash pollution," Torrey highlighted. "The Trump administration and coal ash polluters want to take us back to the bad old days of arsenic, lead, and mercury from coal ash contaminating our water."
In addition to facing a flurry of lawsuits over policies prioritizing the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry—whose campaign cash helped President Donald Trump return to the White House last year—the administration has recently been hit with demands to remove Zeldin from more than 160 advocacy groups and nearly 300 health experts.
"This EPA's actions to put polluters first, at the expense of our health, are dangerous and will be deadly," states the health experts' open letter, organized and released Thursday by the Climate Action Campaign. "Administrator Zeldin has abandoned his sworn duty and must be held accountable for his agenda."
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular