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energy
'Direct Attack on the Health of Americans': Trump EPA Greenlights More Mercury Pollution
Sierra Club said the rollback "puts the public at greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and even premature death, as well as causing severe neurological damage to fetuses and children.”
Feb 20, 2026
The Trump administration on Friday finalized its rollback of clean air regulations limiting mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, sparking condemnation from public health and environmental advocates who warned that the move will increase the risk of death or serious illness for millions of people in the United States.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it is repealing the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which were implemented during the Biden administration in order to protect people from mercury and other toxic air pollutants—including arsenic, lead, and chromium—from fossil fuel power plants.
The Trump administration contends that rescinding MATS will lower financial costs for utilities running older coal-fired plants during a period of rapidly rising demand from consumer and data centers powering artificial intelligence systems.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Friday at the Mills Creek Power Plant, a coal-fired facility in Louisville, Kentucky. "The Trump EPA knows that we can grow the economy, enhance baseload power, and protect human health and the environment all at the same time."
However, the Sierra Club said Friday that "rolling back the new and more protective [MATS] will allow coal- and oil-fired power plants to emit more damaging pollution that puts the public at greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and even premature death, as well as causing severe neurological damage to fetuses and children."
"According to the Sierra Club’s Trump Coal Pollution Dashboard, reversing the 2024 improvements and reverting to the 2012 standards will allow the dirtiest coal-fired power plants to emit 50% more mercury pollution," the group added. "In May 2025, the Trump administration exempted 68 power plants—including some of the biggest polluters in the nation—from MATS after soliciting exemption requests from big polluters over email."
Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign director Laurie Williams called the MATS rollback "a direct attack on the health of Americans."
Last June, Sierra Club was a key part of a coalition of environmental and community groups that sued the Trump administration over the exemptions.
“These protections from mercury and other toxic pollution existed to protect communities from reckless polluters," Sierra Club campaign organizing strategist Bonnie Swinford said Friday. "By repealing these protections, the Trump administration is giving handouts to the coal industry elites—and waging war on the public’s ability to hold polluters accountable."
The Environmental Protect Network also decried the MATS repeal, saying it "will allow hundreds of facilities across 45 states to avoid meeting critical safety standards—jeopardizing public health, degrading ecosystems, and disproportionately harming children, pregnant people, and communities already overburdened by pollution."
"This is no way to make America healthy again."
Moms Clean Air Force co-founder and director Dominique Browning focused on the harms to children the rollback will inflict.
"The science is clear, and profoundly alarming. No amount of mercury is safe for babies’ developing brains," she said. "Mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin that damages the architecture of babies’ and children’s developing brains."
“The mercury rules were working," Browning argued. "Toxic emissions from US coal plants were dropping, and water bodies were getting cleaner. But now EPA Administrator Zeldin’s rollback... will allow coal plants to emit more toxic heavy metals like mercury, chromium, and lead—pollutants that contaminate our air, fall into our lakes and waterways, and poison our food supply."
"This is no way to make America healthy again," she added, referring to one of President Donald Trump's campaign slogans.
Julie McNamara, associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program, said in a statement Friday: “Once again, the Trump administration is abandoning science and abandoning statute to give polluters a free pass. And once again, the Trump administration is doing so at the expense of people’s health."
National Resources Defense Council senior attorney John Walke asserted that "the coal industry is in decline, and dismantling clean air protections won’t bring it back."
“It will only lead to more asthma attacks, more heart problems, and more premature deaths, especially in communities living in the shadow of coal plants," Walke added. "We have a right to breathe clean air, and we will fight for that right even if Trump’s EPA refuses to.”
The EPA’s newest decision will allow power plants to emit more brain-damaging mercury and dangerous soot pollution, putting frontline communities at especially greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and premature death.
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— NRDC (@nrdc.org) February 20, 2026 at 9:09 AM
Friday's EPA announcement followed the agency's repeal earlier this month of the endangerment finding, the Obama-era rule empowering climate regulation over the past 15 years that treated six greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels as a single air pollutant for regulatory purposes.
Speaking at a Friday press conference in Washington, DC organized by Moms Clean Air Force, Talia, a local fourth grade student, said that “climate disasters are becoming more common, and they’re hurting our planet, our health, and the future of kids like me."
“Adults in the government are supposed to protect kids from climate change and not ignore it," she said, adding in a message to Trump officials that "we are taught to listen to scientists and doctors and moms—why don’t you listen to them?”
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'Strongest-in-the-Nation' Data Center Moratorium Proposed in NY
"New Yorkers are suffering from an affordability crisis and a climate crisis, and data centers are going to make both of those much harder to deal with," said state Sen. Liz Krueger, one of the bill's sponsors.
Feb 06, 2026
In response to rising concerns about the extreme energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers, Democratic legislators in New York are proposing a three-year pause on their creation in the state.
The environmental group Food & Water Watch called the proposal, introduced Friday by state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-28) and Assemblymember Anna Kelles (D-125), the "strongest data center moratorium bill in the country," the sort that is in increasing demand as the public becomes aware of the staggering energy costs required to power the centers.
Last month, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that US electricity demand could increase by 60% to 80% over the next quarter century, with data centers accounting for more than half the increase by 2030—costing anywhere from $886 billion to $978 billion and pumping anywhere from 19% to 29% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In large part due to data centers, New York's power grid may fall as much as 1.6 gigawatts short of reliability requirements, according to a projection from the New York Independent System Operator last year.
“Massive data centers are gunning for New York, and right now we are completely unprepared," Krueger said. When one of these energy-guzzling facilities comes to town, they drive up utility prices and have significant negative impacts on the environment and the community—and they have little to no positive impact on the local economy.
"New Yorkers are suffering from an affordability crisis and a climate crisis, and data centers are going to make both of those much harder to deal with," she added.
The bill would halt new data center projects exceeding 20 megawatts for three years and require the state to conduct environmental reviews and propose new regulations to address any identified impacts.
"Data centers are being built rapidly and with little meaningful oversight, despite the serious strain they place on our energy system, water resources, and local communities," explained Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas (D-34), another supporter of the legislation.
"These facilities increase pollution, drive up electricity costs, and threaten farmland and natural land, while disproportionately impacting low-income communities and Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities that have long faced environmental injustice," she said.
According to Politico, pushes to curb data center growth are gaining steam around the country:
New York is the largest state where lawmakers have proposed a moratorium on data centers. But concerns about the growing issue are bipartisan, with Republicans and Democrats backing moratoriums in various states.
Similar measures have been introduced in Maryland, Georgia, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Vermont. A Republican legislator in Michigan—where dozens of local governments have already passed moratoriums—has said she’ll introduce a statewide measure there, as well. In Wisconsin, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate has also called for a moratorium.
Eric Weltman, senior New York organizer at Food & Water Watch, said the bill was necessary to curb "one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation."
"This expansion is rapidly increasing demand for dirty energy, straining water resources, and raising electricity rates for families and small businesses," Weltman said. "New Yorkers are paying the price while Big Tech rakes in the riches. This strongest-in-the-nation moratorium bill is logical, it’s timely, and it will deliver the results we need."
Yvonne Taylor, vice president of Seneca Lake Guardian, said the bill "not only safeguards our shared future here in New York, but sets a powerful precedent for states across the nation."
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What Did the US People Do to Deserve Trump's Lump of Coal?
The Trump administration is trying to prop up coal at the expense of cheaper sources of energy like wind and solar that would benefit the nation as a whole.
Jan 14, 2026
A lump of coal is Santa’s proverbial gift to children who have been naughty. But what naughtiness makes Americans deserve the coal that the Trump administration is trying to inflict on us? The current incoherent energy policy will increase electricity prices even more than they would rise otherwise.
Admittedly, the coming demise of coal, which the administration may delay but not ultimately prevent, will be very hard on the people who work in the coal industry. And it will badly hurt communities where coal is the chief industry and states in which they are located.
Understandably, the coal industry has contributed generously to politicians who try to protect it, and its donations have paid very large dividends for that industry. But forcing electric utilities to keep burning coal, and stomping on potential competitors who could defeat it in any fair competition, is not the right way to protect the people and communities involved in a declining industry.
Government support for these people could take many more reasonable forms, including retraining programs, special support for schools and other local government services, and possibly even making workers eligible to collect Social Security and to be on Medicare before they would otherwise be old enough. These people should not be singled out to pay for the benefits that society as a whole will receive from abandoning the use of coal—the taxpayers as a whole owe it to them.
The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.
Rational policy would not try to protect people in particular energy industries. It would aim to create equal conditions within which all sources of energy could compete. The main present alternatives to coal include oil, natural gas, solar, wind, atomic, and geothermal sources. Each of these has its own unique combination of advantages and disadvantages.
During the last 200 years the world has shifted from one dominant energy source to another as technologies advanced and economic conditions changed. For a long time coal was the cheapest and most abundant fuel, but it was displaced by petroleum and, more recently, by natural gas. Each of these fuels prevailed because it was available and cheaper than the alternatives.
Atomic energy, at one time expected to take over and make electricity “too cheap to meter,” never took off to that extent for various reasons, not the least of which was its expense.
Thanks to research during the last half century, the cheapest sources are now solar panels and wind turbines. They are therefore the chief threats to the coal, oil, and natural gas industries, and especially to coal. That is why the Trump administration has concentrated on wiping out the wind turbine projects in the Atlantic Ocean, even those that are nearly finished and in which billions of dollars have been invested.
The administration claims that the offshore wind projects are a threat to national security, a possibility that had been thoroughly vetted and rejected by government experts before the projects began.
It also claims that wind and solar energy are unreliable, since the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. But these are only problems locally. The sun is always shining on exactly half the planet, and winds are always blowing somewhere.
The intermittency problem does not exist when we consider the world as a whole. Once we have connected up the whole planet into a single electrical grid—now entirely possible—solar and wind energy will be just as dependable as the older energy technologies. And they will be cheaper than the older technologies even when we include the cost of building and operating the grid that they will require.
If we want the cheapest possible electricity—and who doesn’t?—we should support creation of a level playing field for all possible sources of energy. The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.
Does this Republican administration believe in free markets or doesn’t it?
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