President Donald Trump mounted an extraordinary end run around Clean Air Act safeguards Tuesday, granting a select number of coal-fired power plants a two-year break on compliance with an air toxics rule strengthened last year.
The updated rule places “severe burdens on coal-fired power plants, and through its indirect effects, on the viability of our nation’s coal sector,” Trump wrote in a presidential proclamation released late in the day. The move was part of a flurry of measures to prop up the coal industry, partly on the grounds of its importance to national security.
The air toxics regulations, released by EPA last spring during then-President Joe Biden’s tenure, are geared to further cutting emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin especially perilous to babies, and other hazardous air pollutants.
For plants now granted extensions, however, Trump’s proclamation will push back the compliance deadline from July 2027 to July 2029, with another delay possible after that. The administration is meanwhile seeking to revisit — and possibly repeal — last year’s update.
The proclamation does not say how many plants are getting the break; White House press aides did not reply to emailed requests Tuesday night and Wednesday morning for a full list. But it’s believed to include the Colstrip Generating Plant, an eastern Montana facility that ranks among the power sector’s top sources of soot and hazardous air pollutants.
“I think that it is unconscionable that they are giving a free pass to the biggest polluter in the nation that puts out huge volumes of lead, arsenic and mercury — substances that we know harm people and, in particular, harm children,” Anne Hedges, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, said in an interview.
A Colstrip spokesperson did not reply to emailed requests for confirmation, but Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) was at the White House for Tuesday’s signing ceremony.
“Coal keeps the lights on in Montana, and I’m grateful for the President’s strong executive action today to pull the plug on Biden’s failed energy policies, lower energy costs, and restore national security,” Gianforte said in a news release.
There appeared to be no exact precedent for the White House intervention, which is part of a broader deregulatory game plan announced last month by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
As justification, Trump tapped an obscure Clean Air Act provision that allows temporary relief from hazardous air pollutant regulations if the president finds both that a delay would benefit national security and that the technology needed to meet the strengthened standards is not yet available.
In making that determination, Trump wrote that the updated regulations risk the shutdown of many coal-fired plants, thereby undermining national security. He added that the needed pollution control technology does not exist “in a commercially viable form” to meet the 2027 deadline.
Comparable breaks for other industries could be coming soon. The power sector is among nine sectors for which the administration is offering compliance extensions from various Biden-era air toxics rules. Applications for the waivers were due March 31. Asked Wednesday whether other companies are in line for the postponements, an EPA spokesperson referred the question to the White House.
Also veiled in secrecy is what steps, if any, the administration is taking to vet applications. In opening the door for extensions late last month, EPA said Trump would make decisions “on the merits.”
The strengthened EPA power plant regulations were the first significant update to what are formally known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards in more than a decade. They followed a legally required review intended to determine whether advances in pollution control technology made further emissions cuts possible.
Besides closing a loophole on mercury releases for a small number of plants that burn the low-grade form of coal known as lignite, the updated rule slashed a soot emissions rate for all coal-fired plants that serves as a regulatory stand-in for releases of arsenic, nickel and other hazardous metals.
Taken together, the package amounted to a modest tightening of the original Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
“The idea that it’s going to affect national security is laughable,” said Jim Pew, an Earthjustice attorney who has repeatedly helped bring litigation aimed at forcing EPA to strengthen hazardous air pollutant standards. Asked Wednesday whether the group plans to challenge the newly granted compliance extension, Pew declined to comment.
But he took a similarly dim view of the administration’s position that the technology needed to meet the updated standards does not exist after EPA last year concluded that it was in fact available.
“It’s government by lie that is corrosive to the whole system,” he said.
