In April, the Trump administration published an executive order (EO) boosting the coal industry in hopes of a grand revival for an energy source that has been in stark decline since more cost-effective sources, including gas and renewables, drove it from its peak nearly two decades ago. Included in this order was a two-year exemption to a rule that would have required some of the country’s most polluting power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that harm our health.
The EO is among a number of recent orders related to the coal industry, including one directing aging base-load power generators from retiring (although not specifically stated in those terms), as well as “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” which largely focuses on coal extraction and production. Ironically, the suspension of the mercury rule ensures that the coal industry remains neither “beautiful” nor “clean.”.
The Trump administration’s justification for placing a stay on the mercury and air toxic standards (MATS) is suspect at best. The administration claims technology to implement emissions reductions does not exist, so the rule places an “unbearable burden” on coal generators.
This is inaccurate; control technology has advanced significantly since the MATS rule was originally issued in 2012, and technological feasibility was addressed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final rule in 2024, following significant review. The question of control technology feasibility, as is all-too-often the case, is not whether it works, but what it should cost. By eschewing application of modern control technology, Trump’s EO allows coal generators to continue to externalize the costs of their generation, passing the social and health costs of uncontrolled pollution on to surrounding communities and families, propping up an already economically disfavored source of generation at the expense of public health and wellbeing.
The EPA published a list of more than 60 power plants that now have additional time to meet standards that were set to become more stringent in 2027. Critically, this exemption represents a major setback for already overburdened communities, many of which are ranked among the most deprived in terms of income, employment, and life expectancy, as well as those most heavily exposed to harmful chemicals and toxic air pollution.
The impact on overburdened communities
The policy choices described above, combined with the decision to prohibit coal plant retirements, expand the cumulative impacts suffered by communities. These are the combined impacts of multiple harms, as well as prolonged exposures, which result in a greater total harm to people’s health than the sum of individual exposures. These harms include not only discrete exposures to pollution, but socio-demographic factors such as poverty and unemployment, as well as other social determinants of health that increase the allostatic load of community members resulting in illness and early death.
To assess the impact on overburdened frontline communities, we retrieved data from the EJScreen tool (which we backed up before the Trump administration took it offline) and intersected it with the location of the coal generating units included in the executive order. This allowed us to assess which census tracts will face the highest environmental injustices from these exemptions.
The figure below shows these data, where each bar represents the number of census tracts with exempted power plants, ordered by percentile. The further you move to the right on the horizontal axis, the worse the socioeconomic and health conditions of a given census tract are. In the plots, we’ve highlighted the 50th percentile, meaning that census tracts to the right of the red line are worse off than the remaining 50 percent of census tracts in the United States.
Numerous exempted power plants are located in census tracts that have the lowest overall income and the highest unemployment. Strikingly, 66 percent of the power plants are located in low-income census tracts, which are tracts that rank above the 50th percentile in terms of the percentage of the population over twice the poverty line. Moreover, 52 percent are located in census tracts with high unemployment.
When it comes to environmental burdens, it is clear that the coal plant exemption will reinforce decades of environmental injustice these communities have faced. 61 percent of the exempted power plants are located in census tracts that already suffer high exposure to toxic chemicals released into the air by industrial facilities, including power plants.
For example, the Martin Lake Steam Electric Station, located in Texas — one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the country — is located in a census tract that ranks in the 92nd percentile in terms of toxic air pollution, making it one of the worst in the country. Incidentally, this census tract also ranks in the 92nd percentile for the percentage of the population under five years old. Given young children’s higher susceptibility to harmful chemicals, these exposures are particularly dire.
Moreover, 53 percent of the power plants are located in census tracts above the 50th percentile in terms of potential exposure to fine particulate matter (tiny, inhalable particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller), which are linked to increased risks of heart and lung disease. Finally, 59 percent of the power plants are located in census tracts that rank above the 50th percentile for low life expectancy.
On this front, Southern Company stands out. Southern Company owns five power plants that appear among those granted an exemption by the president and the EPA. Among them is the Miller plant in Alabama, which is one of the country’s biggest polluters. All of them are located in census tracts on or above the 75th percentile for exposure to PM 2.5 and above the 61st percentile of census tracts with low life expectancy.
These examples are evidence that mercury and air toxics exemptions will exacerbate harmful impacts on already overburdened communities. Broadly, continuing to externalize the costs of pollution that would otherwise be captured by control technologies is inherently inappropriate — especially since doing so in this instance artificially props up generation technology the market has already moved away from. Passing on the costs of mercury exposure to communities that already have substantial pollution burdens is especially egregious.
Ultimately, this EO is investing in nothing and is only releasing these companies from any obligation not to harm the communities where they operate. That gives them license to further harm the people and places that they have already polluted, while ignoring the underlying economic realities as to why coal generation continues to phase out in the United States.
