Our new EPA: "U.S. Energy Protection Agency" (Part 2)
Promoting fossil fuels from the highest office in the land.
In my last post, I wrote a bit about the changes to environmental regulation that have either been accomplished or are being pursued by the Trump administration, including a wholesale change in the approach to enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
Here, I want to specifically discuss how Trump and his cronies are utilizing the EPA and other departments and agencies to promote the use and development of fossil fuels in the US. Not only are these efforts counter to climate preservation, many do not even make economic sense! The Trump admin is even overtly hampering the development of clean energy sources, despite their consumer appeal.
Trump began his onslaught on the environment with his Day One executive order (EO) “Unleashing American Energy.” Then, in March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a massive deregulation effort. Trump continued with more EOs that favor the fossil fuel industry, especially coal. He even declared an “energy emergency,” giving himself and his administration the power to mandate that fossil fuel plants remain online, even if they may otherwise have been closed or operational, safety, or financial reasons.
Like in other areas of government, Trump is using executive orders to circumvent legally required duties of the executive branch to enforce environmental laws. But also like in other areas of government, this Republican Congress is unlikely to stand up for its own environmental laws. The new “big beautiful bill” that Trump wants Congress to pass would codify many of the changes first dictated by Trump in his EOs.
Altogether, the current US government is putting a massive “finger on the scale” in favor of the fossil fuel industry, with little regard to climate future, human health, or even good economic sense.
Rejecting the “Endangerment” Finding for GHGs
The ability to for EPA to regulate fossil fuel emissions stems from a study and decision under the Obama administration called the “Endangerment Finding,” in which the EPA determined that many of the gasses emitted by burning fossil fuels were harmful to public health. The Obama EPA went a step further and linked those gasses to automobile fuel emissions—thus defining a cause that could be mitigated through regulation.
Although scientists have been studying the “greenhouse effect”—the effect of so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide and methane on the earth’s temperature—for over a century, the U.S. government only realized a right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions following Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), a Supreme Court decision that held that the Clean Air Act gives the federal government the authority to regulate GHGs. The majority decision, joined by all of the four more liberal justices of the time as well as the moderate swing justice, ordered the EPA (then under George W. Bush) to re-review its policy, as the Bush EPA had fought against considering GHGs as “air pollutants” as defined by the Clean Air Act. As the EPA transitioned to the more climate science-friendly Obama administration, this court order led to the critical Endangerment Finding, thus opening the ability for EPA to regulate GHGs.
Despite this adjudicated legal basis, the Trump administration has long been signaling its disagreement with the Endangerment Finding. In his Senate nomination hearing, the current EPA administration Lee Zeldin telegraphed his belief that EPA was not required to regulate carbon dioxide, a primary GHG cause of climate change.
On his very first day in office, Trump issued his “Unleashing American Energy” EO, which required the EPA to review the Endangerment Finding within 30 days. Then, in March, Zeldin announced a major rollback of EPA regulations including the reconsideration of the endangerment finding.
We don’t yet know where Trump’s EPA will land—will they agree with the Obama administration and scientific consensus that GHGs pose environmental and health dangers? The current nominee for Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation, Aaron Szabo, was equivocal in his Senate hearing about whether he would pursue reversing the finding.
Promoting Fossil Fuels
Donald Trump has an old-fashioned vision of the United States in which industrial city skylines are littered with smokestacks. It seems to be part of the American aesthetic that he imagines when he proclaims “Make America Great Again.”
Contrary to this vision, the United States has been shifting away from power plants that belch toxic fumes for decades. A lot of the push is due to the recognition that smog from fossil fuels is unhealthy as well as the realization that continued fossil fuel emissions risk climatic changes that will be catastrophic for many communities.
But a lot of the acceleration away from the dirtiest fuels like coal has been simply economic and consumer-driven. The customers of power want clean air and cheaper power, so the market—sometimes with seed money from the federal government—has developed solutions that meet those needs: especially replacing coal with natural gas and all fossil fuels with economical solar and wind.
Trump and his administration are ignoring this technological progress and instead attempting to reinvigorate the domestic fossil fuel industry by diktat, providing incentives to fossil fuel companies, ignoring or withdrawing health and safety regulations, and even obstructing the wind and solar industries.
A cornerstone of this effort to promote fossil fuels is an April EO that prevents existing energy production facilities from being taken offline, “particularly those secure, redundant fuel supplies that are capable of extended operations.” That quoted bit can be interpreted to mean “not wind and solar”—that is, not power sources that fluctuate with environmental conditions. Thus, this order particularly saves fossil fuel power production facilities, especially coal facilities, many of which were anticipated to close in the near future.
Coal
Burning coal is a particularly harmful and unhealthy—even deadly—way to produce power, even when compared to other fossil fuels. Consequently, the under Biden, the EPA issued rules to further curb harmful emissions. These included updates to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal plants.
But Trump wants the coal industry to thrive. He’s attempting to rebrand coal by fiat, saying, “I tell my people never use the word coal, unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.” And, he has acted to eliminate any regulation that might hinder coal plant operation or add costs to coal plant operators. His administration has even spoken about reopening coal plants that have been closed.
With the EO “Unleashing American Energy,” Trump set the tone for how this new administration would approach energy policy. It ordered an “Immediate Review of All Agency Actions that Potentially Burden the Development of Domestic Energy Resources. […] with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.”
In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin followed by announcing a grand deregulation effort, including repealing the stricter standards (the MATS standards) that Biden set on emissions from coal plants. Reuters reported that the Biden administration thought this standard was “reasonable because 91% of existing coal plants were already meeting it.” Consequently, the repeal of MATS disproportionately benefits the dirtiest plants, the ones that historically disregarded harmful emissions and deprioritized clean air. The EPA allowed coal plants to request exemptions from these clean air rules via email. The dirtiest plant in the country, the Colstrip plant in Montana, was one of 66 coal-fired plants to receive exemptions.
Emissions standards aren’t the only rules being overlooked for coal. The EPA is looking to transfer oversight of coal ash deposits to states and allowing compliance relief on some federal regulations. These deposits of burned coal can leach harmful chemicals into groundwater drinking supplies and, if containment fails, cause catastrophic environmental and health disasters.
In Trump’s “Beautiful Clean Coal” April EO, he classified coal as a critical mineral with the hope of spurring additional coal mining. In response, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has moved to reopen federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal mining. The Biden administration had previously placed a moratorium on new leases in that region. This moratorium aligned with predictions that, even in coal-heavy Wyoming, coal-based power was falling out of favor with utilities, who have been more frequently turning to natural gas and renewable energy.
Despite Trump’s efforts, coal is a dying industry. During Trump’s first term, more coal plants closed than during the previous term under Obama or the following term under Biden, even though Trump claimed that he would end “the war on coal.”
Here’s a graph from the New York Times showing the retirements of coal power plants with during recent presidential administrations:
The coal industry is fighting against the economic headwinds of cost and consumer preference, and Trump can only forestall the inevitable. New coal plants cost $90/megawatt hour, while new natural gas is $43/MWh and solar (without battery storage) is $23/MWh. The Energy Innovation NGO, a non-partisan clean energy lobbying group, has found that “99 percent of [coal] plants (209 out of 210) are more expensive to run than replacing their generation capacity with either new solar or new wind.”
The AP reported, “John Deskins, director of the West Virginia University Bureau of Business and Economic Research, said it would take a significant shift in the underlying economics for it to make financial sense for utilities to build new coal-fired plants.”
For this current, second-term attempt to revive coal, Trump is promoting the use of coal energy to power the large data centers necessary for advanced artificial intelligence technologies. It’s true that these data centers require considerable amounts of energy. It’s much less clear that the private companies that are building these data centers will want to power them with coal. The trend now is nuclear.
The major tech companies interested in major data expansion have looked to one or more of the many nuclear companies interested in building small-ish scale reactors that would pair nicely with energy-hungry data centers. It’s difficult to believe that they would give up on this investment strategy for the unpopular coal industry—after all, these companies still have leaders, employees, and customers who understand the dangers of climate change and were among the first to latch on to the electric vehicle trend. Trump has not shown antipathy towards nuclear energy; in fact, his administration is reportedly aiming to streamline the nuclear permitting process. Even if these major tech firms did pivot away from nuclear, there are many renewable strategies to choose from (wind, solar, hydropower—especially in the Northwest) and of course natural gas, which is simply cheaper than coal.
Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE) is joining in on the preferential treatment for the coal industry by making $200 billion in loan money available to energy plants. Secretary Chris Wright is repurposing money from the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, a loan guarantee program that was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump has repeatedly lambasted that Biden-era law, even going so far as to pause all funding of grants and loans associated with it. (A federal judge has ruled that the funding must be disbursed pending a final court decision on the withheld funds.)
Notably, the law defining the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program states: “A project […] that involves electricity generation through the use of fossil fuels shall be required to have controls or technologies to avoid, reduce, utilize, or sequester air pollutants and anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”
We’ll have to see if Secretary Wright ensures that he only gives this low-cost financing to fossil fuel power plants that abide by this legal caveat—as the law requires.
Even while Trump is propping up the coal industry, he is removing health, safety, and employment protections for coal workers. This includes pausing enforcement of a rule that would limit miner exposure to harmful silica dust, one of the causes of black lung and other pulmonary diseases. Without enforcement, mining operators will not have ensure that their employees are protected from excessive dust exposure.
Trump purports to deeply respect coal miners; at a fundraiser he said, “They love to dig coal. That’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and gadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands. They’re big strong hands.”
But what happens when these “big strong hands” are injured on the job? What happens when they contract black lung disease well before retirement and can no longer work in the mines?
The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) run a program referred to as “Part 90” that ensures that coal miners that develop black lung disease are allowed to continue working, but in safer job positions. As one miner who now needs an oxygen tank told Reuters, “"Part 90 - that's only the thing you got. You can come out from underground, make what you made, and then they can't just get rid of you."
This program is now at risk of being severely understaffed or even cut completely, as NIOSH has laid off most staff. At the Morgantown, WV NIOSH occupational safety research center, Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) successfully lobbied to temporarily reinstate some NIOSH employees. The Morgantown center is a leader in coal safety, lung disease, and respiratory equipment research. Despite the temporary reprieve for this specific facility, West Virginians are finding it difficult to access NIOSH programs, including "Part 90".
Oil & Natural Gas
This post is already getting exorbitantly long, so I’ll direct you to this guest essay by Robinson Meyer in the New York Times about the discrepancies and inconsistencies in Trump’s oil and natural gas policies: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/trump-energy-oil-gas-prices.html
Meyer’s cogent argument is essentially that Trump is claiming an “energy emergency,” but he’s not necessarily focused on increasing supply (which would decrease prices in the short-term)—instead, he’s ensuring that there will be continued future demand for fossil fuels.
One new policy of note is that the Bureau of Land Management will no longer require environmental impact statements for applications for oil and natural gas leases in several western states. This is one consequence of the drastic administrative change in how the federal government implements the National Environmental Policy Act—now leaving implementation up to individual agencies instead of issuing central guidance. I have more details on changes to NEPA in my previous post here.
The Interior Department will also reopen the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and allow the construction of a new pipeline through Alaska.
Methane Deregulation
Congress, in its feckless way, has found at least one way to show their support for Trump’s fossil fuel initiatives—a joint resolution that “disapproves the rule” from the Biden EPA that charges a fee to gas and oil plants that emit a large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can cancel regulations with simple majorities in both houses.
The Inflation Reduction Act changed the Clean Air Act to require the EPA to regulate methane emissions, so to do anything more than “disapprove” of the EPA’s current rule would require a change in legislation and thus votes from Democrats in the Senate to overcome the filibuster.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the Trump EPA will not be stymied by the Republican-led Congress in its efforts to promote fossil fuels, even if that requires ignoring the government’s obligations under the Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation. The “big beautiful bill” that Republicans in Congress are trying to pass to codify many of Trump’s policies includes overturning the methane fee as well as many of the environmental policies in Trump’s EOs.
Obstructing Clean Energy
Trump and his administration are not only promoting fossil fuels through policy; they are also actively obstructing wind and solar. In the “Unleashing American Energy” EO, Trump conspicuously left out wind and solar from the list of energy resources to enable and unburden. It’s this omission that betrays Trump’s claim that his support for fossil fuels is in response to an “energy emergency”.
If the United States is really facing an energy emergency, especially to the point of disregarding clean air standards to spur the uneconomical growth of coal, why would we hamper the development of any energy producing technology?
Trump’s hatred of windmills is well-known. He recently unsuccessfully fought the Scottish government for allowing windmills to be built offshore of his Scottish golf club. Now, Trump has halted all new offshore wind permits, and Trump’s EPA has revoked a Clean Air Act permit for an offshore wind project in New Jersey and another in New York, and has been asked to revoke another for a project in Massachusetts.
Solar power was quickly becoming the “go-to” choice for new power installations. In 2024, over 80% of new electricity added to the US grid came from solar energy. Unlike wind, some solar projects are getting approved. Nonetheless, solar has been criticized along with wind by the Trump administration as expensive and unable to replace fossil fuels.
Trump has placed absurdly high tariffs on imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia. While there have been long-standing issues with unfair trading practices (that the Biden administration also dealt with), there’s also a risk that these tariffs will lead to very high price increases for solar equipment in the US, reducing its competitiveness against fossil fuels—especially since Trump and the Republicans in Congress are getting rid of clean energy incentives like clean energy grants and potentially the residential solar tax credit.
Overall, the Trump administration’s policies have already begun impeding the clean energy industry, which downsized by almost $8 billion in Q1 of 2025.
Impeding Electric Vehicles
That critically important “Unleashing American Energy” EO also dictated that US policy would now be to “eliminate the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate’ […] terminating, where appropriate, state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles”.
This is a direct reference to California’s long-standing waiver under the Clean Air Act to regulate tailpipe emissions within its own state boundaries. Normally, the authority to regulate air quality falls with the federal government, but Congress recognized that California had been building expertise in air quality regulation since the 1960s and thus allowed CA to set its own standards, so long as they were at least as stringent as federal standards. CA’s ever-tightening standards on vehicular emissions combined with the sheer economic size of the state have been a major force behind the shift to electric vehicles. Because the CA car market is so large, car manufacturers design for their tighter standards. As California goes, so goes the country.
To be clear, there never was an “EV mandate” that Trump could end. Emissions standards have been tightening—a trend that the Trump administration will likely end—but gasoline-powered vehicles are still the norm throughout the US.
If Congress votes to repeal the CA waiver—which the Senate might do soon—that could be a major step backward in our recent shift towards electric vehicles. Congress is also looking to repeal EV tax credits. Because internal combustion or hybrid engine vehicles remain popular in the US (often due to affordability or concerns about battery power ability), these policy regressions could considerably delay US progress towards low emission vehicles, causing the US to fall behind other global markets in developing EV technology.
A comprehensive survey- thank you very much for it!