23-05-2025
Trump delayed pollution limits on the nation's dirtiest coal plants. Is one near you?
Trump delayed pollution limits on the nation's dirtiest coal plants. Is one near you? The Trump administration says cheaper energy is the goal.
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What do Lee Zeldin's EPA rollbacks mean for Americans?
Lee Zeldin announced the Environmental Protection agency would roll back regulations aimed fighting climate change and pollution.
Before leaving her East Texas home, Paulette Goree checks her air monitor. If the hue is green on the connected phone app, she steps outside to tend to her backyard garden where she grows tomatoes, squash and peppers. If it is red, she stays inside.
Over the years, she has watched respiratory illnesses strike her family one by one. Her sister died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her father battled a lung disease. Her husband has it now. Goree has asthma herself.
Goree, 72, lives in Beckville, a town of fewer than 800 people, just miles from the Martin Lake coal plant, a 2.4-gigawatt facility that has loomed over the region since the late 1970s.
'We all know how harmful the Martin Lake pollution can be,' Goree told USA TODAY, sitting inside her mustard-colored house. 'The majority of the people in our little community suffer with some kind of respiratory ailment.'
Luminant Generation Company, which owns the facility, did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding Goree's account and steps taken by it to reduce emissions.
Last year, the EPA said the surrounding counties, Rusk and Panola, had failed to meet air quality standards, blaming Martin Lake as the major source. Luminant disagreed, calling the EPA's finding 'unsupported.' The agency stood by its analysis, reaffirming that not enough steps were taken to clean up the surrounding areas.
But new federal actions could stall or even erase efforts to reduce air pollution. In April, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation that delays a key pollution rule, related to mercury and fine particles, for 68 power plants by two years, pushing the deadline to 2029. The Environmental Protection Agency has also proposed repealing those updated standards entirely, meaning plants may never have to meet them at all.
The rules, updated by the Joe Biden administration last year, would have required continuous monitoring and tighter pollution limits, especially for plants that burn lignite coal, a particularly dirty form of fuel. Operators decried the rule as too costly. Governors from several states sued.
A USA TODAY review of federal data found that many of the 60-plus power plants benefiting from the exemption are among the nation's worst polluters, including six that rank within the nation's top 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters from 2023, the latest available year. Many of these companies have also paid hundreds of millions in environmental fines and settlements in recent decades.
Several pollutants from coal plants have dropped in the past decade, which experts attribute largely to the EPA's 2012 standards for these pollutants.
Even then, coal plants continue to emit large amounts of mercury, fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides – all of which can be harmful to public health.
According to a USA TODAY analysis, these 68 power plants emitted 8% of total mercury emissions, a disproportionate figure considering these plants only formed less than a percent of the 14,000 facilities that reported emissions in 2020, the latest available year on EPA's National Emissions Inventory.
Luminant Generation-owned Martin Lake in East Texas, where Goree lives, is one of the facilities on the exemption list.
The plant is among the nation's top sulfur dioxide emitters and the sixth largest for nitrogen oxides, according to 2024's EPA Clean Air Markets Program Data. It was also among the largest mercury emitters in 2020, according to the National Emissions Inventory data.
Each time she sees the plant's three smokestacks in the distance, she finds herself thinking about the air her community is breathing, Goree said.
Goree remembers her town through images of crickets singing and fireflies lighting up the night sky. She has always loved being outside, tending to her garden, or spending time near Martin Lake, a 5,000-acre body of water known for its bass and catfish. These days, though, fewer people fish there, she said. Fewer still picnic or hike in the nearby park, she added.
'I just want to live out my retirement years in peace and quiet with clean air to breathe and fresh water to enjoy the outdoor life,' she said, emphasizing that public health should be central to climate policy.
'That's my biggest concern. It's something they can do to help the community, and they're just not doing it,' Goree said.
Farther south in Fort Bend County, longtime resident Haley Schulz spent years working in the oil and gas industry until motherhood and a deep dive into environmental research transformed her into an environmental rights advocate. She discovered she lives just 15 miles from W.A. Parish, the largest coal plant in Texas. Then things from her past started to make sense: her classmates always carrying inhalers, her own relentless cough that once sent her to the emergency room.
'It felt like my chest was on fire,' Schulz recalled. 'It felt like I was having a heart attack every single time I had a tickle in my throat.'
Doctors diagnosed her with costochondritis from the nonstop cough, she said. While they could not say if pollution was to blame, Schulz said the irritation she feels after visiting parks near the plant speaks volumes.
'That's not nature,' she said after visiting parks near the plant. 'That's the soot.'
Search the coal plant closest to you below. Includes facilities beyond the ones exempted from the EPA rule.
USA TODAY reached out to NRG Energy, who operates the W.A. Parish plant and three others on the exemption list. The company spokesperson, Ann Duhon, didn't directly comment on Schulz's experience but said that the company does not see any short-term impacts due to the proclamation, which it said it is currently reviewing.
'In recent years, NRG has invested millions of dollars installing environmental technologies at our facilities, which will remain in place regardless of any EPA rollbacks,' the email statement said.
About half of the companies or parent companies that operate the exempted power plants have a history of environmental violations, according to a review of data compiled by the nonprofit Good Jobs First.
In 2006, the Alabama Power Company, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, agreed to settle for $200 million with the federal government over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act from its James H. Miller Jr. plant. The same year, East Kentucky Power Cooperative agreed to pay over $600 million for similar violations.
Virginia Electric Power Co., a subsidiary of Dominion Energy which has a power plant on the exemption list, has a Clean Air Act settlement totaling $1.2 billion in 2003. More recently, in 2023, Dynegy Midwest Generation reached a settlement for 'disposal of coal ash that allegedly led to groundwater pollution.'
After all it could be inevitable
Coal operators spread across two dozen states, mostly in Republican-leaning counties, welcomed the move.
Scott Brooks, spokesman for Tennessee Valley Authority, which has four of the exempted power plants, told USA TODAY, in an email: 'This exemption will allow TVA to keep running these assets in a cost-effective way and help ensure reliability for our 10 million customers,' adding that their facilities follow the previous and current standards.
East Kentucky Power Cooperative Spokesperson Nick Comer said that the updated rules targeting mercury and air toxins would have forced it to turn off a coal-fired unit if just one of the 8000-plus fabric bags get a dime-sized hole.
When resources are limited and market power is expensive, Comer said, 'this could lead to tens of millions of dollars in costs for replacement power and market performance penalties.'
The Southern Company said in a statement to USA TODAY, 'extending the current deadline will provide additional time needed both to address potential rule changes and further demonstrate compliance to the current requirements.'
Coal powered America's industrial revolution, but its role in the country's energy grid has declined significantly over the recent decades, down to just over 15% of electricity in 2024, from about half at the beginning of this century. The shift has been driven not only by policy, but also by economics as cheaper and easier-to-maintain energy sources have emerged. Notably among them is natural gas, while wind and solar have been gradually increasing their contributions.
The transition to renewable energy is 'inevitable over the long term', said Julie McNamara, an associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
'The Trump administration is attempting to take every measure it can to prop up coal plants, against economics, against public health, against climate,' McNamara said.
'This will provide potentially a little more money in the pockets of the coal plant owners, but it will not provide for the communities that house these coal plants,' she said.
According to the latest Energy Information Administration data, hundreds of coal-fired plants have closed over the past decades, leaving only a couple hundred operational, many of which are scheduled for retirement within the next decade.
Deregulation: The bigger picture
The EPA is proposing broader changes to pollution control standards, including revisiting the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for fine particulate matter. This is how the agency defines what levels are considered unhealthy.
The agency also wants to reconsider the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program which requires the nation's largest facilities to tally up those emissions every year.
Whether or not people breathe clean air isn't entirely up to the EPA. States and local governments play a key role, as they are responsible for writing and enforcing permits. But, experts say, the signals from the top might impact decision-making downstream.
'If the message they're getting from the EPA is all this deregulation or these rollbacks still meet the definition of Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, then what you're telling that audience is, don't do anything,' said Joseph Goffman, a former assistant administrator at the EPA office overseeing air pollution rules.
The Trump administration also recently proposed a 55% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget that would bring the staffing back to 1980s levels.
'Even if there were no budget cuts, and the rules remained in place, the administration seems committed to maintain a deregulatory environment, including by not doing enforcement,' Goffman said.
When USA TODAY reached out to the EPA for a response, the agency's press office shared an unsigned emailed statement saying that the president may exempt any stationary source on grounds of national security interests or based on the determination that the technology is not available.
'This is an authority that solely rests with the President, not EPA,' the statement said.
However, the regulatory agency did not respond directly to the questions sent by USA TODAY and referred to the White House.
In an emailed statement, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers said: 'President Trump's commonsense agenda unleashes American energy to protect our national security, lower the cost of living, and provide necessary electrical demands for emerging technologies such as AI. While the media refuses to acknowledge that American energy is much cleaner than foreign energy, hardworking Americans voted for President Trump to roll back harmful and radical regulations.'
In total, the EPA has announced at least half a dozen plans to scrap or scale down rules and programs that have contributed to the progress of cleaning up the air and curbing the impacts of climate change.
Ananya Roy, an epidemiologist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the arguments for deregulation are to reduce costs and regulatory burden.
'EPA's mission is supposed to be to protect public health, and in this instance, they won't be,' Roy said.
