Not Just Another Monday
Today in Houston, the Trump administration plans to tell the world that America will no longer limit the climate pollution pouring out of power plants that burn coal and gas. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will make the announcement at a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum standing beside him. If the rule survives in court, it wipes out the most significant climate protections of the Obama and Biden years and stands to block future presidents from regulating these emissions at all.
The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide in this country, responsible for nearly a quarter of our greenhouse gas pollution. If American power plants were their own nation, they would rank as the fifth largest climate polluter on Earth. The rules being erased would have cut a billion metric tons of carbon by 2047.
Follow the Money to Mar-a-Lago
In April 2024, Trump hosted roughly twenty oil and gas executives for dinner at his Florida club and, after hearing them complain about environmental rules, made them an offer that witnesses later described as blunt and transactional: raise one billion dollars for my campaign, and I will erase the regulations you hate, because what you save in taxes and legal costs will dwarf what you spend on me. He called it a deal. He meant it.1
The industry paid. Disclosed giving to his campaign and allied PACs reached at least 75 million dollars. Fossil fuel interests put another 11.8 million into his inauguration. One pipeline company and its CEO alone had sent 25 million dollars to his main super PAC by last fall, at a time when he is barred from running again. Republican lawmakers who took the same money passed a tax package handing oil and gas companies 18 billion dollars in incentives and cut support for clean energy in the same bill. Zeldin’s own agency put a price tag on this rollback, estimating it saves the power sector 1.2 billion dollars a year, about 19 billion over two decades. Your lungs, your kids’ asthma inhalers, the flood insurance bill, and the hotter summers ahead did not make it into that math.
Big Oil bought influence over the White House and over the Republican lawmakers who cheer each rollback, and every American who breathes gets to cover the cost. Profits today, and the bill lands on children who never got a vote.
Your Move
The courts will get their shot, and very experienced, well-meaning lawyers are already lining up to argue that the Clean Air Act still requires this agency to regulate carbon, even after the administration scrapped the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health. You get your shot too.
Call your representative and your senators (202-224-3121) and ask them one plain question: how much did the fossil fuel industry give you, and what did you give back? Share this with the people at your dinner table who still think this is about cheaper electricity. Then vote like the air your grandchildren breathe depends on it, because it does.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
I hate these fuckers with the heat of a thousand suns
This situation exists, including the finding that CO2 harms health, because the clean air act doesn’t define CO2 as a pollutant. That sounds like a one sentence amendment to the Clean Air Act. Why has this not been done? Seems that Democrats could get this legislation forward and force Republicans to publicly vote against and Trump to publicly veto it. And use that in an ongoing push about how Republicans are screwing up a
The world.