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Nearly three years ago, Vermont passed a landmark law that aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by shifting residents away from using fossil fuels to heat their homes and businesses. Last month, that plan officially died before ever being put into action — and the path toward cleaner heating in the state is murkier than ever.
In May 2023, Vermont legislators passed the Affordable Heat Act, which is widely considered the first law to require the development of a statewide clean heat standard to lower emissions from heating sources. But after years of contentious debate and recent inaction from lawmakers, regulators closed the case in February, possibly for good.
More than one-third of Vermonters rely on furnaces and boilers fueled by oil — one of the dirtiest and most expensive home-heating sources — and about another 20% primarily use propane. Though the clean heat standard did not mandate a switch to electric heat pumps, the policy would likely have spurred greater adoption of the appliances, which are cleaner and cheaper to run.
Some see the clean-heat turnaround as a financial victory for Vermonters, while others see it as a frustrating loss that will only hurt residents and the planet. How, though, did the pioneering plan manage to fizzle out before it even got started? The answer is a mix of complicated politics, an even more complex policy design, and interference from out-of-state conservative groups.
“There ended up being an enormous amount of misinformation floating around about it, which was very frustrating,” said state Sen. Anne Watson, a Democrat/Progressive who voted for the law. “When people are not circulating well-vetted info, that doesn’t serve anybody — that just serves to scare people.”
Vermont has set a legally mandated target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Almost all the electricity generated in Vermont comes from renewable sources, including hydropower, solar, and biomass, but the state is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for heating and transportation. That’s where the clean heat standard came in.
A clean heat standard, broadly defined, is a policy mandating that providers of heating fuels steadily lower the emissions associated with their operations. It’s an adaptable approach, said Richard Cowart, a former Vermont utility regulator and a principal at the nonprofit Regulatory Assistance Project, which advises governments on clean energy policy. Each state implementing such a standard will make its own rules about what kinds of clean energy to include, how quickly to transition, and what fuels to target for reduction.
“It leaves choice in the hands of building owners, homeowners, small-business operators,” Cowart said. “It allows some creativity in implementation and flexibility in the way programs can be rolled out.”
This vision has sparked interest in several other states, but is hitting some obstacles. Colorado in 2021 passed a law requiring natural gas distributors to create clean heat plans. Massachusetts’ Department of Environmental Protection has a clean heat standard in the works, but Democratic Gov. Maura Healey recently delayed the implementation until 2028. Another six to nine states have expressed interest in or have begun exploring the concept, but nothing else is on the books, Cowart said.
Vermont’s idea was to create a “market-based system” in which fuel dealers would obtain a certain number of clean heat credits each year. Credits could be generated by installing weatherization upgrades or heat pumps, or by selling fuels with lower emissions; dealers could offer these services themselves or buy credits from other entities doing that work. Either way, the system would have helped pay for a less emissions-intensive heating system across the state.
The standard’s political foundations were never unshakable. The first shot at establishing the policy occurred in 2022. The heavily Democratic legislature passed a bill creating a clean heat standard, but Republican Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the measure. An attempt to override the veto fell one vote short in the state House.
In 2023, a bill was again passed and again vetoed. This time, the veto override succeeded by one vote in the Senate. Part of the deal that helped the legislation pass was a provision that required regulators to design the program and then bring it back to lawmakers for another vote before it could be implemented.
“That was pretty unusual,” Watson said. “Usually, you design a program, then the rules take effect, basically, immediately.”
Lawmakers never had a chance to take that second vote.
Regulators released their program design and cost estimates in 2025. Those intervening years gave opponents time to build their case against the program. Their main argument: The clean heat standard would dramatically raise prices for any Vermont household still using heating oil, as sellers would pass their compliance costs on to customers. Scott’s administration repeatedly claimed the plan could increase heating oil prices by up to $4 per gallon (for comparison, current prices average $3.65 per gallon), though the basis of this number was never clear.
While the numbers weren’t available until 2025, utility regulators ultimately calculated that the program would cost residents a total of about $956 million in its first 10 years of operation and provide societal benefits of $1.5 billion. The average price of heating oil would go up an estimated 8 cents per gallon in the beginning, rising to 58 cents in 2035. But those using heat pumps could expect to save some $500 per heating season on fuel costs compared with burning oil, or to save over $1,000 compared with using propane.
Shortly before the bill passed, Americans for Prosperity, a national conservative policy advocacy group founded by oil-industry billionaires Charles and David Koch, arrived in the state as part of an effort to expand its work into traditionally left-leaning states. In May 2024, it launched a direct-mail campaign attacking the clean heat standard and inaccurately complaining that the policy would put severe restrictions on natural gas, impose a tax on heating oil, and mandate the installation of heat pumps in homes.
“We were not having a full and fair and accurate conversation about the costs and the opportunities the program could deliver,” said Johanna Miller, energy and climate program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
Then came the 2024 election. In historically deep-blue Vermont, Scott was reelected and 22 legislative seats flipped from Democratic to Republican, eliminating the supermajority that had enabled the veto override the previous year.
At the time, there was widespread concern in the state about property tax increases related to education funding. Republicans took advantage of this ongoing financial unease to inflate and mischaracterize the costs of a clean heat standard, said former state Sen. Chris Bray, a Democrat and major force behind the clean heat standard bill, who lost his seat in the election.
“It got weaponized in the campaign season, with a broad misinformation campaign,” Bray said.
The highly detailed work of designing the clean heat standard created its own complications.
In February 2024, state utility regulators issued the first mandated progress report on their efforts and noted that most participants in the process — including the public utilities commissioners themselves — had “serious misgivings” about whether a thoughtful and effective policy could be put together on the timeline dictated by the law.
The complexity of the program came up again and again. Commenters noted that the standard was difficult for average Vermonters to understand, and extensive education and outreach efforts would be needed. Others suggested that cost and confusion would drive small fuel dealers out of business, leaving consumers with fewer choices and potentially higher prices.
“We opposed this not because the idea wasn’t good, but because the execution was fatally flawed,” said Matt Cota, a lobbyist for fuel sellers who was a member of the Clean Heat Standard Technical Advisory Group.
Even the regulators who designed the standard ultimately advised against adopting it. In a January 2025 report, the public utility commissioners concluded that “the Clean Heat Standard is not well suited to Vermont.” A more effective choice, the commission said, would be to expand upon existing programs, such as the fee that generates revenue for electric-efficiency programs.
In the face of a likely gubernatorial veto, and the recommendations from the commissioners, even those lawmakers who still believed in the policy saw no way forward
“It was the chastened legislature that was unable and unwilling to pick it up and go further,” Bray said.
Lawmakers say the clean heat standard, in the form passed in 2023, is unlikely to be introduced again. Some supporters of the standard worry that further action is unlikely as long as Scott is governor. But advocates of the underlying ideas think some program to incentivize greenhouse gas reductions from heating is necessary and inevitable, even if it is not a fast process.
“That’s going to come back, because it’s something that we know has to be achieved,” Cowart said. “Over the course of a generation this work is going to get done.”
This article was originally published by Project Drawdown and is republished here with attribution.
It’s no secret that the Trump Administration wants coal to make a comeback.
As America’s appetite for electricity grows, Trump and his appointed officials have stated, often and plainly, that they want to use “clean” coal to meet this demand.
However, you shouldn’t be fooled by the rebrand. This isn’t some new type of coal; it’s the same coal humans have been burning for centuries, just with additional steps to capture some of the pollution. “Clean” coal still has all of the environmental, health, and economic issues associated with its mining, transportation, and use in power plants. Not to mention the inconvenient, but often overlooked fact that coal can spontaneously combust.
Let’s take a closer look at “clean” coal: what it is, whether or not it actually works, and what the alternatives are for meeting rising energy demand.
Clean coal refers to coal burned in power plants using technologies that aim to reduce the amount of pollution released during combustion. The number of pollutants targeted under the umbrella of clean coal has changed over time, but these technologies have been used effectively to reduce pollutants like sulfur dioxide (a major cause of acid rain), nitrogen dioxide (which contributes to ground-level ozone), and particulates (which can cause respiratory distress).
Now, “clean” coal is meant to go even further, using recent developments in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the exhaust gas of coal power plants and store it underground. While this sounds great in theory, in practice, it is much more complicated.
Currently, only two coal power plants in the world have CCS technologies installed, one in Canada and the other in the US. Part of the reason so few plants have added CCS is the high initial installation cost and high energy consumption for operation. To operate CCS, a coal power plant would have to consume 20–25% of the energy it produces.
And while coal is still a sizeable chunk of U.S. power generation, its share of overall generation is dropping. Yet the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scale, using emergency orders to force coal power plants that were set to retire to stay up and running. Unfortunately, keeping aging infrastructure can be costly, both for the operators themselves and their consumers.
All of this makes the economics of CCS very challenging, as plant operators will have less electricity to sell, more expenses to sustain and retrofit aging facilities, and higher ongoing operating costs. To recoup those costs, operators will have to sell electricity at a higher price, a tall order given already skyrocketing energy prices across the country.
And that’s just the economic and political challenges facing “clean” coal. There’s also the problem of upstream emissions and the inconvenient truth that coal pollution doesn’t start at the power plant.
Even if “clean” coal were economically and politically viable, it still wouldn’t solve one of the biggest, but often overlooked risks of the dirty fuel: spontaneous combustion.
Spontaneous coal combustion (SCC) occurs when coal suddenly catches on fire without any ignition source. While the causes of SCC are not well understood, the negative repercussions are abundantly clear.
SCC reduces the value of coal resources, releases pollution into the environment, damages mining equipment, and affects the health and safety of workers. Indeed, coal fires are among the greatest safety hazards for coal mining communities and miners, emitting a number of planet-warming and health-harming gases, including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, ethylene, ethane, as well as particulate matter and coal tar, both of which can be hazardous to people’s health and the environment.
Though quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from SCC is challenging, one study based in China estimated that the annual loss of 20 Mt of coal from SCC may be responsible for as high as 42 Mt of carbon dioxide equivalents, which is roughly the same as the annual emissions from 9 million gas-fueled cars. Such emissions would still occur even if every coal plant in the country were retrofitted with CCS technologies.
Once upon a time, coal power made sense. It was an abundant, cheap fuel source that could be used virtually anywhere, and even though it had its downsides, it was economically more sensible than other energy sources. But the economic realities of electricity generation have changed over the past decade.
Electricity generated by renewables like solar and wind is now cheaper than electricity from coal power plants. The International Energy Agency found that over 96% of the newly installed solar and wind capacity in 2024 had lower power generation costs than new coal and gas plants, and over 92% of total power expansion that year came from renewables.
In addition, with new and growing demands for electricity for everything from vehicle electrification to AI datacenters, a large amount of power is needed quickly, and solar and wind power are among the fastest to be installed. An average renewable energy facility takes between one and three years to come online, while coal and gas-fired power plants can take up to five years or more.
Ultimately, when deciding whether to keep U.S. coal plants online or even build new ones, it's good to remember a prescient quote often attributed to a surprising source, a former Saudi oil minister: “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.” It’s never been clearer that the global leaders of tomorrow will be those who harness the clean, abundant, and cheap renewable energy sources now available to us. The real question, then, is not whether or not the U.S. should support “clean” coal, but rather, will the U.S. put down the stones and move boldly toward a better future?
Jason Lam, BSc, MEL, is a research fellow focusing on the buildings, electricity, and industry sectors. Jason has a Bachelor of Science degree in biosystems engineering with an environmental specialization from the University of Manitoba. He also has a Master of Engineering Leadership in clean energy engineering from the University of British Columbia, expanding his technical knowledge in clean energy and developing business acumen skills.
This work was published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. You are welcome to republish it following the license terms.
About Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown is the world’s leading guide to science-based climate solutions. Our mission is to drive meaningful climate action around the world. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Project Drawdown is funded by individual and institutional donations.
At the start of this year, the European Union officially launched the world’s first tariff on the carbon footprints of imports. It’s already looking to carve out a loophole.
The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, requires importers to pay a fee based on the carbon dioxide emissions of the goods they bring in.
It’s a major global policy experiment — one that will have plenty of opportunities to prove itself as the EU busily expands its trade deals. In January, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen inked a sweeping free-trade deal with the South American bloc known as Mercosur, putting an end to 25 years of negotiations. The following week, she announced a landmark pact with India, which included pledges to ramp up purchases of steel, pharmaceuticals, and heavy equipment from the world’s most populous nation.
Both agreements share a notable trait: They keep CBAM in full force. But in the background, the von der Leyen administration has been less than steady on the policy and has floated a major change that could undermine the law’s efficacy.
Currently, CBAM doesn’t allow for any exemptions from the tariff. But in an amendment drafted in mid-December, the European Commission pitched giving itself the discretionary authority to temporarily remove the carbon levy from particular imports, and even retroactively apply the exemption.
Heavy industry groups and European parliamentarians across the political spectrum have balked at the commission’s proposal in recent weeks.
That’s because while the carbon tariffs are meant to reduce emissions, they also serve as a type of industrial policy that can level the playing field between foreign and domestic manufacturers. Industrial firms in the EU have long been required to offset their emissions by buying credits on the bloc’s Emissions Trading System market, driving the cost of their products higher than those of goods manufactured in countries without such rules.
CBAM rectifies this price discrepancy by subjecting foreign firms to the same carbon fees. For now, the price of carbon dioxide emissions will be calculated by averaging the auction price of Emissions Trading System credits each quarter. Starting next year, the pricing is set to more precisely track the ebbs and flows of overseas factories’ emissions by moving to a weekly average.
The idea that the EU may choose to exempt certain products could sap confidence in the policy and make it harder for foreign firms to justify long-term investments in new, cleaner assembly lines.
“It’s a big deal even before passing into law,” said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, the head of trade and supply chains at the consultancy BloombergNEF. “The prospect of sectoral exclusions, even temporary by nature, communicates worrying uncertainty to business at a time when the relevant investments in low-carbon European production require long-term policy visibility.”
The proposal, called Article 27a, has what he called “a few hoops to jump through first” before the European Commission could start removing tariffs on any industry. Namely, the European Parliament and the European Council will need to vote to approve the amendment. A vote is not yet scheduled.
The pressure for this “emergency brake” on CBAM is coming from a familiar force in EU politics: farmers.
French and Italian agricultural ministers pressed Brussels for the amendment over concerns that CBAM could drive up the price of fertilizer, squeezing farmers’ margins. Such a price shift could risk widespread protests like the so-called nitrogen wars that started in 2019, when the Dutch government’s crackdown on agricultural emissions triggered a revolt among farmers.
But even if the amendment is passed into law, the European Commission cannot halt tariffs at its pleasure. Before suspending the tariff for any products, it must run assessments to determine whether CBAM’s impact on prices of relevant goods, like fertilizer, is significant enough to justify doing so.
“It isn’t clear to me that fertilizer prices would go up by enough to warrant activating 27a over, say, the coming year — even if punitive default values were used,” Vagneur-Jones said. “My sense is that we won’t be seeing the provision’s activation anytime soon.”
Still, the proposed pullback highlights “a growing conviction among Europeans that the EU is more or less fighting climate change alone,” said Adam Błażowski, the supervisory board chairman of the climate group WePlanet, which advocates for what it sees as pragmatic solutions, such as nuclear power and genetically modified crops.
“This may not be entirely accurate, but this trend only increased after the United States’ second departure from the Paris Agreement,” he said. “Mechanisms like CBAM function to preserve a certain level of equality between different economies, but rapidly progressing climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions. Unfortunately in an age of kinetic and trade wars all around Europe, this seems to be an increasingly difficult task.”
Equipping CBAM with an emergency brake may also have practical benefits that go beyond placating political constituencies. It could reduce regulatory complexity, for example — something of increasing importance to EU leaders who want to rejuvenate domestic industries, protecting the continent against geopolitical aggression from Russia, China, and, of late, the U.S.
“Looking to the future of a low-carbon economy, we may not be able to move as fast as we might like, but we have to move as fast as we can,” said Joseph Hezir, the former finance chief of the Department of Energy and current president of the EFI Foundation, a nonpartisan energy-policy think tank. “The 27a discussion right now is really about, how fast can we move in that direction?”
Europe’s carbon tariff may soon have company. Several other countries are considering what Hezir called “CBAM-like programs,” including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Taiwan. In a Friday post on X in response to the Supreme Court’s decisions to strike down President Donald Trump’s tariffs, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, called on the White House to champion his “Foreign Pollution Fee” bill, which “levels the playing field.”
CBAM’s impact is already being felt outside the 27-nation EU. In December, analyst Jian Wu cited the European tariffs as a major force behind China’s “thriving” hydrogen-fired metallurgy this year. With CBAM entering into force, he wrote in his newsletter China Hydrogen Bulletin, “Chinese steel exporters are facing real pressure to decarbonize their businesses.”
With 60% of its steel exports already headed for Europe before the signing of last month’s free-trade deal, India is also feeling the spur of CBAM on its notoriously coal-choked industrial and utility sectors.
Still, the policy is colliding with a harsh political climate. Anything that raises prices on European consumers is becoming radioactive, said Josh Freed, the chair of Catalyse Europe, a climate policy group.
“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices way up, Europeans’ tolerance for any policies that they perceive as increasing prices is nonexistent,” he said. As a result, “slowing down and adjusting” both CBAM and the Emissions Trading System schemes “is just policy meeting reality.”
Across Illinois, dozens of communities are locked into contracts to buy power from the state’s biggest coal plant for decades to come. But two cities in search of cheaper, cleaner energy want out.
The Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a nonprofit that procures power for 32 municipal electric utilities, has been asking its members to extend their commitments to buy energy through the group until 2055, even though existing contracts don’t lapse for another decade. Most communities signed on, but two that account for almost half of IMEA’s power demand — the Chicago suburbs of Naperville and St. Charles — have rebelled, declining to renew their contracts past 2035.
A major reason: residents’ desire to get cleaner energy and break ties with the Prairie State Energy Campus, a 1.6-gigawatt facility in rural southern Illinois that is the state’s largest coal plant. IMEA owns 15% of Prairie State, which makes up over a third of the agency’s power portfolio. IMEA also has an ownership stake in the Trimble coal plant in Kentucky, meaning coal represents almost half of its generation assets.
Since the two cities aren’t planning to re-up with IMEA, they are free to negotiate power supply deals with other companies that they hope can provide renewable energy and cheaper rates.
“We don’t want to have financial responsibility for burning coal. That’s what this is all about,” said Ted Bourland, a Naperville resident who belongs to the volunteer community group Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force. He said that task force members and city leaders have already talked with power suppliers, like Constellation and NextEra, that indicated interest in providing Naperville with energy, including renewables.
The cities’ refusals to renew commitments involving the coal plant may seem procedural or mundane at first glance. But the saga shows that residents can successfully demand a say in where their energy comes from. The effort is also an example of how communities are moving to ditch coal power even as the Trump administration works to prop up the declining industry.
Challenges still lie ahead for Naperville and St. Charles. It may prove complicated for them to find new deals that prioritize clean sources, as proliferating data centers in the region race to secure energy, especially renewables, to help tech giants meet their climate goals.
“You’re a municipal utility in northern Illinois, you have a decent load,” said Mark Pruitt, an energy consultant and Northwestern University adjunct professor who formerly ran the state agency that procures energy for Illinois’ two biggest utilities. “But you’re not as large as the data centers that are all competing for capacity in northern Illinois. What makes you think you’re going to compete favorably with the data centers?”
Bourland said Naperville could consider continuing with IMEA down the road, especially if the agency can offer a deal with more renewables.
But IMEA says that it needs promises of future investment from its members to construct or acquire new generation — including renewables.
“Without extensions beyond 2035 with our member cities, IMEA cannot procure new, favorable 20-year renewable energy agreements,” said Staci Wilson, IMEA vice president of government affairs and member services. She added that other municipalities extending their commitments allowed IMEA to contract for 150 megawatts of solar in 2024.
Wilson said that IMEA would be “open to discussions” with Naperville in the future, though it would consider market conditions and other factors in deciding whether to renew with Naperville at a later date.
Prairie State was developed starting in 2007 by the utility American Municipal Power and the coal company Peabody Energy, owner of a nearby mine that serves the plant. The plant cost $5 billion to build and began operating in 2012. Under a complicated structure, the complex is owned by nine electric utility agencies, including IMEA, that procure electricity for more than 200 municipalities across eight states.
The communities were promised that Prairie State would provide stable and affordable energy rates. However, the deals became problematic for some towns, which struggled to cover the plant’s construction costs and even faced bankruptcy, since they had taken on debt to finance the investment and didn’t receive as much revenue or power from the plant as expected in its early years. Peabody sold its ownership stake in Prairie State in 2016, leaving municipalities to bear a larger share of the debt.
Under IMEA contracts, residents pay rates that may be higher or lower than what other Illinois residents pay, depending on fluctuations in the power markets. Over the coal plant’s life, their bills have been slightly higher than they would have been with ComEd, the utility serving most of the Chicago area, according to an analysis by Pruitt that was commissioned by Naperville. In addition to their power bills, the municipalities will be paying through 2035 for the cost of building the coal plant. Since IMEA is a part owner of the coal plant, its members can benefit from the sale of the facility’s energy when power prices and power demand are high, making the plant’s energy competitive on the market. Conversely, when market prices are low, coal plant ownership is not as good a deal.
In recent years, scores of coal plants have closed because they can’t compete with cheaper energy sources. In 2021, clean energy think tank RMI published a report finding that customers would likely save money if Prairie State were replaced by clean energy sources
In 2024, IMEA began asking municipalities to renew their contracts through 2055. So far, 29 have done so. The village council in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka voted for renewal in June 2025, despite opposition from residents who wanted cleaner energy.
But pushback in St. Charles yielded a very different result.
“Over the course of more than a year and a half, we consistently showed up at city council meetings, we consistently met one-on-one with the city councilmen and the mayor,” said resident Debi Mader, retired from a long career in marketing for Sears Holdings. “We got enough people interested in the topic — it’s not a very sexy topic.”
Finally, in August, St. Charles officially declined to renew its IMEA contract.
Residents in Naperville — IMEA’s largest energy user — similarly rallied opposition to renewing the contract. Bourland said that St. Charles’ decision gave Naperville advocates hope that they too could resist the agency’s proposal.
In September, Naperville sent IMEA a proposed contract calling for mandatory net-zero emissions by 2050. The agency countered that it would “endeavor to achieve” carbon neutrality by 2050, but declined to set binding targets.
On Feb. 3, the city council voted 6–3 to cease contract negotiations with IMEA.
“I am over the moon,” Bourland said. “This is a reward for over two years of focus. It was an uphill climb.”
As St. Charles and Naperville seek to distance themselves from Prairie State, Illinois as a whole still faces tough questions around the plant’s future while the state works to decarbonize. The facility has long enjoyed support from labor unions and some Illinois politicians, and spiking demand from data centers as well as federal politics could make it tough to close.
Prairie State is billed as utilizing “clean coal” technology, and Illinois leaders have long hoped that carbon capture and sequestration will be successfully implemented at the plant. But there’s been little progress toward that goal, and the concept of carbon sequestration is highly controversial in southern Illinois.
A 2024 study by the Frontier Group ranked Prairie State as the 12th worst climate polluter of any industrial facility nationwide. The plant also spews significant amounts of health-harming pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.
At Naperville’s Feb. 3 city council meeting, 15-year-old high school student Adi Julka lamented, “We are, in effect, the dirtiest city in all of Illinois,” since the community is the largest IMEA member. “We are complicit in both the damage to our environment and everyday Illinoisans’ financial and physical well-being.”
Illinois’ landmark 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act nearly failed because of pushback to its requirement that Prairie State reduce its emissions. The law not only requires all fossil-fuel generation to cease by 2045, but also mandates Prairie State specifically to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2038, which would likely mean closing one of its two units.
But IMEA noted in an October memo to Naperville that the federal government could order Prairie State to keep operating regardless of emissions mandates. In the past year, the Trump administration has ordered several coal plants to keep running beyond scheduled closure dates. IMEA also noted that Illinois’ 2021 climate law contains exceptions from fossil-fuel emissions limits if needed to maintain grid reliability.
Indeed, reliability concerns loomed at the two-and-a-half-hour Naperville city council hearing this month. Residents with a group called Affordable Naperville, for example, argued that extending the IMEA contract is crucial to ensuring predictable energy supplies in an uncertain future.
“Current headlines warn of increasing stress on the grid, price spikes as demand surges from things like data centers, electric vehicles, and economic growth,” said longtime resident Patrick Hughes.
Other residents argued that the quickly changing energy landscape is all the more reason for Naperville to weigh its options and bide its time, rather than rush to sign a contract committing it to an outdated energy source — coal — for many years into the future.
“The city spoke,” resident John Doyle said. “We want a greener option than what IMEA has to offer.”
President Donald Trump has made it quite clear how he feels about state laws that aim to make fossil fuel companies pay for damages caused by climate change. An executive order issued in April compared these efforts — known as climate superfund laws — to extortion. The administration has since sued New York and Vermont, the two states with these measures on the books.
This hostility, however, has not stopped a growing number of state legislatures from taking up their own climate superfund proposals. Last month, legislative committees in Maine and New Jersey advanced bills. Lawmakers in Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island are also considering such legislation. Connecticut lawmakers plan to add their state to the list.
Why do the proposals continue to multiply despite steadfast federal opposition? Because the law and the science are both on their side, proponents say. And because it’s just fair.
“Climate superfund laws are based on the principle that if you make a mess, you clean it up,” said Jamie Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Conservation Law Foundation. “It’s kindergarten-level ethics.”
States, municipalities, and tribal governments have tried a variety of strategies for holding oil and gas companies responsible for the problems created by their products. Some have sued, accusing fossil fuel interests of deceiving the public or investors by concealing the hazards of burning hydrocarbons. Others have filed antitrust cases, accusing major companies of colluding to dominate the market, leaving customers locked into climate-damaging products.
Climate superfund laws take a different, arguably more practical approach, by pointing to very visible storm and flooding impacts, and demanding compensation. While the details vary from state to state, climate superfund bills all have a similar framework. They call for the state to tally up expenses incurred by climate change — which could include both recovery costs and protective measures — and then to divide the total among major fossil fuel suppliers and start collecting the money.
The money collected would alleviate the burden on taxpayers by repaying states for past recovery efforts — the cleanup Vermont had to undergo after catastrophic flooding in 2023, for example — and by covering future resilience projects, like wetlands restoration.
“Taxpayers right now are footing the bill for all of it,” said Rhode Island state Rep. Jennifer Boylan, a Democrat, one of the sponsors of the state’s bill. “The folks that are responsible are not contributing, and it’s just not fair.”
Opponents — which include fossil fuel companies, attorneys general from oil-producing states, and, of course, the Trump administration — have deployed several arguments against these laws.
The broadest is that these measures interfere with the federal government’s attempts to unleash American energy dominance by penalizing fossil fuel companies. Others claim that consumers would see prices go up as a result of the added costs. They also argue that the laws constitute an attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which has historically been under federal authority.
It’s also worth noting that superfund laws make sense only if you accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and thus leading to more destructive weather. The Trump administration rejects this premise. Last Thursday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repealed the scientific finding that greenhouse gases are a harm to public health and welfare, which has underpinned the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases for the last 16 years.
Still, lawmakers and advocates behind these bills believe that the law backs them up.
Climate superfund laws are modeled on the federal Superfund program, which was established in 1980 to hold corporations financially accountable for cleaning up soil contamination they had caused. The program was challenged repeatedly, but courts upheld the law time and again — a precedent that is encouraging to proponents of climate superfund legislation.
“You can see why this law was attractive when thinking about greenhouse gas emissions and climate,” said Kirt Mayland, a visiting professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “The hope is that courts will provide the same protection as they did for the conventional Superfund.”
The strength of this approach, he said, is that the laws and bills do not target federally regulated emissions, despite opponents’ claims. Climate superfund bills focus not on what’s happening in the atmosphere but rather on what’s happening on the ground: observably flooded towns and storm-damaged businesses.
Opponents have played up concerns that it would be difficult to accurately quantify the contributions greenhouse gases make to climate change and then properly allocate responsibility among multiple parties. Supporters, however, say there are ways to do just that.
The Carbon Majors Database is a collection of data about the historic emissions of 178 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers, including private and public companies as well as entire countries. Using this information, the growing field of attribution science can connect emissions to climate impacts and even, in some cases, to specific storms, heat waves, or other extreme weather events, said Carly Phillips, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The science is really robust around the magnitude and scope of emissions that can be traced,” she said. “It really provides a template to answer those kinds of questions.”
Phillips said that she would welcome engagement and dialogue around the science, but that she is not hearing any good-faith skepticism from opponents. Instead, she sees only a wholesale rejection of attribution science, aimed, she believes, at delaying climate action as long as possible.
The lawsuits targeting New York and Vermont will take some time to resolve, and are likely to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, Mayland said. In the meantime, neither state has yet assessed any charges under the laws. Still, continuing to push these new bills, even in the face of federal and industry hostility, could increase their eventual chances of success, proponents say.
In Rhode Island, where climate superfund legislation has been introduced for a second year in a row, lawmakers are learning more about how the proposal works, and the idea is gaining support, Boylan said. Ongoing conversations about the idea will help pave the way for adoption when some of the legal questions are resolved, said Connecticut state Rep. Steve Winter, a Democrat who plans to support his state’s climate superfund bill.
“There’s no doubt that legal challenges to Vermont and New York’s legislation create a cloud of uncertainty, but I don’t think that should stop us from advancing the public conversation,” he said. “It’s that important.”
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.
President Donald Trump has all but dismantled U.S. efforts to curb pollution that’s warming the planet and harming human health.
Yet with every federal blow to climate action, states have launched a counterpunch. Take Colorado: After Trump and congressional Republicans ended federal EV tax credits, the state juiced its own clean-car incentives. California has meanwhile inked a deal with the United Kingdom to cooperate on clean energy and climate efforts. And several other states are considering “climate superfund” laws, which seek to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change–induced damages.
But instead of doubling down on decarbonization in this critical hour, and despite touting that it has one of the most ambitious climate laws in the country, New York is quietly backing away from its efforts.
The most recent and symbolically loaded move concerns that very same climate law, the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. New York’s utility regulator is currently considering suspending its marquee clean-energy goal, which requires the state to get 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and 100% by 2040.
To be clear, New York is not on track to meet this target anyway. But behind the proposed rollback is a petition, signed by two natural gas company veterans, which claims that the target will jeopardize grid reliability, Gothamist reports. New York’s grid operator has cautioned that power shortfalls are a mounting risk, but environmental advocates point out that the warning doesn’t take a ton of soon-to-connect clean energy projects into account. That includes two offshore wind projects that have been slowed by the Trump administration.
It’s just the latest climate retreat by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is up for reelection this year.
Last year, New York was poised to implement a first-of-its-kind ban on fossil-fueled heating and appliances in new homes and buildings. But in November, just before the rule was set to take effect, the state said it wouldn’t enforce the regulation while a lawsuit continued to play out.
Hochul has also repeatedly delayed the implementation of the cap-and-invest program that’s essential to New York’s emissions goals, leaving what could be billions of dollars for renewables construction and energy-efficiency projects in limbo.
And while Hochul has called for more clean energy and nuclear power to meet rising demand, she has also signaled natural gas is essential to the state’s energy strategy, as she allowed a previously rejected pipeline to move forward.
Hochul’s motive for most of these moves has been clear: She’s worried about rising power prices in the state and has cited a need to “govern in reality” amid the federal government’s clean energy assault. But as a warming climate puts New York and the rest of the world increasingly at risk, running in the wrong direction on decarbonization is anything but governing in reality.
What the endangerment finding rollback means for automakers
The EPA last week revoked the endangerment finding, which underpins the U.S. government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This rollback has upended federal tailpipe emissions regulations, which the administration says will curb vehicle prices and save Americans as much as $1.3 trillion by 2055.
But the EPA’s own analysis tells a different story, The Guardian reports. It estimates Americans will rack up more than $1.4 trillion as they buy more fuel, need more repairs, and face increased traffic and noise — essentially negating those touted savings.
And it’s unlikely that U.S. automakers will backtrack on vehicle efficiency like the EPA wants, experts tell The New York Times. The rest of the world is still moving toward electric vehicles, so cars that use more gasoline are the opposite of what other countries — and many Americans — will buy.
Fake public comments are clean energy’s latest threat
As if clean energy didn’t have enough challenges to deal with.
Last June, Southern California’s top air-quality authority rejected a plan that would have pushed the region away from gas appliances. Regulators received tens of thousands of comments opposing the plan, but a Los Angeles Times investigation found at least 20,000 of them appear to have been AI-generated. The agency’s staffers also reached out to some alleged commenters, and at least three said they hadn’t written a comment.
The incident is similar to what Canary Media’s Kathiann M. Kowalski reported on earlier this month. In Ohio, state regulators may reject a solar farm that received dozens of public comments opposing it. But as the project’s developer found, and Kowalski verified, more than 30 of those commenters appear to have used fake names or lied about living in the county where the solar farm will be built.
Another coal-plant prop-up: Documents indicate that the Trump administration will move to let coal plants emit more hazardous pollutants, including mercury, in an attempt to juice the industry. (New York Times)
Chillin’ with Duke Energy: Canary reporter Elizabeth Ouzts let North Carolina utility Duke Energy remotely lower her thermostat in exchange for bill credits, and even in a recent cold spell, Ouzts says she found the savings meaningful. (Canary Media)
Illinois’ nuclear reversal: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) calls for the state to build at least 2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, just a month after lifting the state’s long-standing moratorium on nuclear construction. (Bloomberg)
Cancer Alley’s new threat: Louisiana residents already saturated with petrochemical pollution now face a wave of “blue ammonia” plants, which will burn fossil fuels and potentially saddle them with even more emissions. (Floodlight)
Power surge: 2025 was a tough year for clean energy in the U.S., but grid batteries still set another installation record as more solar power came online and power demand rose. (Canary Media)
On 12 February, US president Donald Trump revoked the “endangerment finding”, the bedrock of federal climate policy.
The 2009 finding concluded that six key greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), were a threat to human health – triggering a legal requirement to regulate them.
It has been key to the rollout of policies such as federal emission standards for vehicles, power plants, factories and other sources.
Speaking at the White House, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin claimed that the “elimination” of the endangerment finding would save “trillions”.
The revocation is expected to face multiple legal challenges, but, if it succeeds, it is expected to have a “sweeping” impact on federal emissions regulations for many years.
Nevertheless, US emissions are expected to continue falling, albeit at a slower pace.
Carbon Brief takes a look at what the endangerment finding was, how it has shaped US climate policy in the past and what its repeal could mean for action in the future.
The challenges of passing climate legislation in the US have meant that the federal government has often turned instead to regulations – principally, under the 1970 Clean Air Act.
The act requires the EPA to regulate pollutants, if they are found to pose a danger to public health and the environment.
In a 2007 legal case known as Massachusetts vs EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. It also directed the EPA to determine whether these gases posed a threat to human health.
The 2009 “endangerment finding” was the result of this process and found that greenhouse gas emissions do indeed pose such a threat. Subsequently, it has underpinned federal emissions regulations for more than 15 years.
In developing the endangerment finding, the EPA pulled together evidence from its own experts, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the wider scientific community.
On 7 December 2009, it concluded that US greenhouse gas emissions “in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations”.
In particular, the finding highlighted six “well-mixed” greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2); methane (CH4); nitrous oxide (N2O); hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs); perfluorocarbons (PFCs); and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
A second part of the finding stated that new vehicles contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that endangers public health and welfare, opening the door to these emissions being regulated.
At the time, the EPA noted that, while the finding itself does not impose any requirements on industry or other entities, “this action was a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and other sectors”.
On 15 December 2009, the finding was published in the federal register – the official record of US federal legislation – and the final rule came into effect on 14 January 2010.
At the time, then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement:
“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President [Barack] Obama’s call for a low-carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation.
“This pollution problem has a solution – one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”
The endangerment finding originated from a part of the Clean Air Act regulating emissions from new vehicles and so it was first applied in that sector.
However, it came to underpin greenhouse gas emission regulation across a range of sectors.
In May 2010, shortly after the Obama EPA finalised the finding, it was used to set the country’s first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from light-duty engines in motor vehicles.
The following year, the EPA also released emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles and engines.
However, findings made under one part of the Clean Air Act can also be applied to other articles of the law. David Widawsky, director of the US programme at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Carbon Brief:
“You can take that finding – and that scientific basis and evidence – and apply it in other instances where air pollutants are subject or required to be regulated under the Clean Air Act or other statutes.
“Revoking the endangerment finding then creates a thread that can be pulled out of not just vehicles, but a whole lot of other [sources].”
Since being entered into the federal register, the endangerment finding has also been applied to stationary sources of emissions, such as fossil-fuelled power plants and factories, as well as an expanded range of non-stationary emissions sources, including aviation.
(In fact, the EPA is compelled to regulate emissions of a pollutant – such as CO2 as identified in the endangerment finding – from stationary sources, once it has been regulated anywhere else under the Clean Air Act.)
In 2015, the EPA finalised its guidance on regulating emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants. These performance standards applied to newly constructed plants, as well as those that underwent major modifications.
This ruling noted that “because the EPA is not listing a new source category in this rule, the EPA is not required to make a new endangerment finding…in order to establish standards of performance for the CO2”.
The following year, the agency established rules on methane emissions from oil and gas sources, including wells and processing plants. Again, this was based on the 2009 finding.
The 2016 aircraft endangerment finding also explicitly references the vehicle-emissions endangerment finding. That rule says that the “body of scientific evidence amassed in the record for the 2009 endangerment finding also compellingly supports an endangerment finding” for aircraft.
The endangerment finding has also played a critical role in shaping the trajectory of climate litigation in the US.
In a 2011 case, American Electric Power Co. vs Connecticut, the Supreme Court unanimously found that, because greenhouse gas emissions were already regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act, companies could not be sued under federal common law over their greenhouse gas emissions.
Widawsky tells Carbon Brief that repealing the endangerment finding therefore “opens the door” to climate litigation of other kinds:
“When plaintiffs would introduce litigation in federal courts, the answer or the courts would find that EPA is ‘handling it’ and there’s not necessarily a basis for federal litigation. By removing the endangerment finding…it actually opens the door to the question – not necessarily successful litigation – and the courts will make that determination.”
The official revocation of the endangerment finding – initially posted to the EPA’s website – was published in the federal register on 18 February.
It states that the ruling will be effective from 20 April.
It is set to face no shortage of legal challenges. The state of California has “vowed” to sue, as have a number of environmental groups, including Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the National Resources Defense Council.
Dena Adler, an adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law, tells Carbon Brief there are “significant legal and analytical vulnerabilities” in the EPA’s ruling. She explains:
“This repeal will only stick if it can survive legal challenge in the courts. But it could take months, if not years, to get a final judicial decision.”
At the heart of the federal agency’s argument is that it claims to lack the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in response to “global climate change concerns” under the Clean Air Act.
In the ruling, the EPA says the section of the Act focused on vehicle emissions is “best read” as authorising the agency to regulate air pollution that harms the public through “local or regional exposure” – for instance, smog or acid rain – but not pollution from “well-mixed” greenhouse gases that, it claims, “impact public health and welfare only indirectly”.
This distinction directly contradicts the landmark 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs EPA. (See: What is the ‘endangerment finding’?)
The EPA’s case also rests on an argument that the agency violated the “major questions doctrine” when it started regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
This legal principle holds that federal agencies need explicit authorisation from Congress to press ahead with actions in certain “extraordinary” cases.
In a policy brief in January, legal experts from New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity argued that the “major questions doctrine” argument “fails for several reasons”.
Regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is “neither unheralded nor transformative” – both of which are needed for the legal principle to apply, the lawyers said.
Furthermore, the policy brief noted that – even if the doctrine were triggered – the Clean Air Act does, in fact, supply the EPA with the “clear authority” required.
Mark Drajem, director of public affairs at NRDC, says the endangerment finding has been “firmly established in the courts”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“In 2007, the Supreme Court directed EPA to look at the science and determine if greenhouse gases pose a risk to human health and welfare. EPA did that in 2009 and federal courts rejected a challenge to that in 2012.
“Since then, the Supreme Court has considered EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations three separate times and never questioned whether it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. It has only ruled on how it can regulate that pollution.”
However, experts have noted that the Trump administration is banking on legal challenges making their way to the Supreme Court – and the now conservative-leaning bench then upholding the repeal of the endangerment finding.
Elsewhere, the EPA’s new ruling argues that regulating emissions from vehicles has “no material impact on global climate change concerns…much less the adverse public health or welfare impacts attributed to such global climate trends”.
“Climate impact modelling”, it continues, shows that “even the complete elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions” of vehicles in the US would have impacts that fall “within the standard margin of error” for global temperature and sea level rise.
In this context, it argues, regulations on emissions are “futile”.
(The US is more historically responsible for climate change than any other country. In its 2022 sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that further delaying action to cut emissions would “miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.)
However, the final rule stops short of attempting to justify the plans by disputing the scientific basis for climate change.
Notably, the EPA has abandoned plans to rely on the findings of a controversial climate science report commissioned by the Department of Energy (DoE) last year.
This is a marked departure from the draft ruling, published in August, which argued there were “significant questions and ambiguities presented by both the observable realities of the past nearly two decades and the recent findings of the scientific community, including those summarised in the draft CWG [‘climate working group’] report”.
The CWG report – written by five researchers known for rejecting the scientific consensus on human influence on global warming – faced significant criticism for inaccurate conclusions and a flawed review process. (Carbon Brief’s factcheck found more than 100 misleading or false statements in the report.)
A judge ruled in January that the DoE had broken the law when energy secretary Chris Wright “hand-picked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming”, according to the New York Times.
In a press release in July, the EPA said “updated studies and information” set out in the CWG report would serve to “challenge the assumptions” of the 2009 finding.
But, in the footnotes to its final ruling, the EPA notes it is not relying on the report for “any aspect of this final action” in light of “concerns raised by some commenters”.
Legal experts have argued that the pivot away from arguments undermining climate science is designed with future legal battles over the attempted repeal in mind.
As mentioned above, a number of groups have already filed legal actions against the Trump administration’s move to repeal the endangerment finding – leaving the future uncertain.
However, if the repeal does survive legal challenges, it would have far-reaching implications for federal efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions, experts say.
In a blog post, the WRI’s Widawsky said that the repeal would have a “sweeping” impact on federal emissions regulations for cars, coal-fired power stations and gas power plants, adding:
“In practical terms, without the endangerment finding, regulating greenhouse gas emissions is no longer a legal requirement. The science hasn’t changed, but the obligation to act on it has been removed.”
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Widawsky adds that, despite this large immediate impact, there are “a lot of mechanisms” future US administrations might be able to pursue if they wanted to reinstate the federal government’s obligation to address greenhouse gas emissions:
“Probably the most direct way – rather than talk about ‘pollutants’, in general, and the EPA, say, making a science-specific finding for that pollutant – [is] for Congress simply to declare a particular pollutant to be a hazard for human health and welfare. [This] has been done in other instances.”
If federal efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions decline, there will likely still be attempts to regulate at the state level.
Previous analysis from the University of Oxford noted that, despite a walkback on federal climate policy in Trump’s second presidential term, 19 US states – covering nearly half of the country’s population – remain committed to net-zero targets.
Widawksy tells Carbon Brief that it is possible that states may be able to leverage legislation, including the Clean Air Act, to enact regulations to address emissions at the state level.
However, in some cases, states may be prevented from doing so by “preemption”, a US legal doctrine where higher-level federal laws override lower-level state laws, he adds:
“There are a whole lot of other sections of the Clean Air Act that may either inhibit that kind of ability for states to act through preemption or allow for that to happen.”
The Trump administration’s decision has received widespread global condemnation, although it has been celebrated by some right-wing newspapers, politicians and commentators.
In the US, former US president Barack Obama said on Twitter that the move will leave Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change – all so the fossil-fuel industry can make even more money”.
Similarly, California governor Gavin Newsom called the decision “reckless”, arguing that it will lead to “more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts and greater threats to communities nationwide”.
Former US secretary of state and climate envoy John Kerry called the decision “un-American”, according to a story on the frontpage of the Guardian. He continued:
“[It] takes Orwellian governance to new heights and invites enormous damage to people and property around the world.”
An editorial in the Guardian dubbed the repeal as “just one part of Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels”, but added that it “may be his most consequential”.
Similarly, an editorial in the Hindu said that Trump is “trying to turn back the clock on environmental issues”.
In China, state-run news agency Xinhua published a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam attempting to turn an ageing car, marked “US climate policy”, away from the road marked “green development”, back towards a city engulfed in flames and pollution that swells towards dark clouds labelled “greenhouse gas catastrophe”.
Conversely, Trump described the finding as “the legal foundation for the green new scam”, which he claimed “the Obama and Biden administration used to destroy countless jobs”.
Similarly, Al Jazeera reported that EPA administrator Zeldin said the endangerment finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the US economy, including the American auto industry”. The outlet quoted him saying:
“The Obama and Biden administrations used it to steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”
An editorial in the Washington Post also praises the move, saying “it’s about time” that the endangerment finding was revoked. It argued – without evidence – that the benefits of regulating emissions are “modest” and that “free-market-driven innovation has done more to combat climate change than regulatory power grabs like the ‘endangerment finding’ ever did”.
The Heritage Foundation – the climate-sceptic US lobby group that published the influential “Project 2025” document before Trump took office – has also celebrated the decision.
Time reported that the group previously criticised the endangerment finding, saying that it was used to “justify sweeping restrictions on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions across the economy, imposing huge costs”. The magazine added that Project 2025 laid out plans to “establish a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding”.
Climate scientists have also weighed in on the administration’s repeal efforts. Prof Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, argued that there is “no legitimate scientific rationale” for the EPA decision.
Similarly, Dr Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said in a statement that, since the establishment of the 2009 endangerment finding, the evidence showing greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment “has only grown stronger”.
Dr Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former White House official, gave a statement, arguing that “ramming through this unlawful, destructive action at the behest of polluters is an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok”.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute, wrote that Trump is “slowing climate progress”, but that “it won’t put a stop to global climate action”. They added:
“The rest of the world is moving on and thanks to Trump’s ridiculous insistence that climate change is a ‘hoax’, the US now stands to lose out in the great economic revolution of the modern era – the clean-energy transition.”
Federal regulations and standards underpinned by the endangerment finding have been at the heart of US government plans to reduce the nation’s emissions.
For example, NRDC analysis of EPA data suggests that Biden-era vehicle standards, combined with other policies to boost electric cars, were set to avoid nearly 8bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) over the next three decades.
By removing the legal requirement to regulate greenhouse gases at a federal level from such high-emitting sectors, the EPA could instead be driving higher emissions.
Nevertheless, some climate experts argue that the repeal is more of a “symbolic” action and that EPA regulations have not historically been the main drivers of US emissions cuts.
Rhodium Group analysis last year estimated the impact of the EPA removing 31 regulatory policies, including the endangerment finding and “actions that rely on that finding”. Most of these had already been proposed for repeal independently by the Trump administration.
Ben King, the organisation’s climate and energy director, tells Carbon Brief this “has the same effect on the system as repealing the endangerment finding”.
The Rhodium Group concluded that, in this scenario, emissions would continue falling to 26-35% below 2005 levels by 2035, as the chart below shows. If the regulations remained in place, it estimated that emissions would fall faster, by around 32-44%.
(Notably, neither of these scenarios would be in line with the Biden administration’s international climate pledge, which was a 61-66% reduction by 2035).
There are various factors that could contribute to continued – albeit slower – decline in US emissions, in the absence of federal regulations. These include falling costs for clean technologies, higher fossil-fuel prices and state-level legislation.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, coal plants have become uneconomic to operate in the US compared with cheaper renewables and gas. As a result, Trump has overseen a larger reduction in coal-fired capacity than any other US president.
Meanwhile, in spite of the openly hostile policy environment, relatively low-cost US wind and solar projects are competitive with gas power and are still likely to be built in large numbers.
The vast majority of new US power capacity in recent years has been solar, wind and storage. Around 92% of power projects seeking electricity interconnection in the US are solar, wind and storage, with the remainder nearly all gas.
The broader transition to low-carbon transport is well underway in the US, with electric vehicle sales breaking records during nearly every month in 2025.
This can partly be attributed to federal tax credits, which the Trump administration is now cutting. However, cheaper models, growing consumer preference and state policies are likely to continue strengthening support.
Even if emissions continue on a downward trajectory, repealing the endangerment finding could make it harder to drive more ambitious climate action in the future. Some climate experts also point to the uncertainty of future emissions reductions.
“[It] depends on a number of technology, policy, economic and behavioural factors. Other folks are less sanguine about greenhouse gas declines,” WRI’s Widawsky tells Carbon Brief.
19/02/2026: This article was updated to include information about the publication of the official revocation of the endangerment finding in the federal register.
When music superstar Bad Bunny climbed an electric pole during the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, he showcased a painful reality during what was otherwise a joyous celebration of Puerto Rican culture.
Puerto Rico’s power grid has been crumbling for nearly a decade, ever since Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the U.S. territory in 2017 and all but destroyed its centralized electricity system. Bad Bunny highlights the ailing grid in his 2022 song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), which he sang yesterday from a sparking utility pole in a show seen by perhaps 135 million viewers.
Despite billions of federal recovery dollars and post-hurricane repairs, Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents continue to endure widespread disruptions, electrical surges, and soaring electricity rates — even on storm-free days. Utility customers in Puerto Rico experienced an average of 27 hours of power grid interruptions not related to major events like hurricanes per year between 2021 and 2024. By contrast, people living on the U.S. mainland lacked power for an average of just two hours per year, according to federal data.
Yet rather than invest in Puerto Rico’s recovery, the Trump administration is clawing back key federal funding meant to modernize and decarbonize the territory’s electricity system.
In January, the Department of Energy canceled $450 million for grid resilience programs in Puerto Rico, Latitude Media recently reported. The clawback effectively marks the end of the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund that the Biden administration launched in 2023 to help keep people’s lights on and their schools open, hospitals running, and supermarkets stocked.
President Donald Trump’s DOE had previously redirected $365 million of that funding meant for rooftop solar and battery storage projects toward “practical fixes and emergency activities.” To the administration, that means doubling down on the old model: far-flung power plants fueled by coal, oil, and gas, which send electricity along transmission lines that crisscross the island — and which were mercilessly mowed down during last decade’s hurricanes.
But some energy experts and community leaders say that approach is impractical. They argue that building clean and distributed energy systems close to population centers is the best way to supply Puerto Ricans with reliable, affordable power that can withstand natural disasters.
Rooftop solar systems with batteries have already become a lifeline for residents and community groups across the archipelago. Amid a power-generation shortfall last July, Puerto Rico’s grid operator relied on customers’ batteries to prevent the grid from collapsing.
As of June 2025, 1.2 gigawatts of grid-connected rooftop solar were installed on homes and businesses, supplying more than 10% of the total energy used, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That tally doesn’t include the many off-grid systems that people have installed to shore up their own resiliency.
Still, many low- and moderate-income households aren’t able to access the benefits of clean, distributed energy, a challenge that the federal programs were meant to help address. Advocates are still pressing ahead. Casa Pueblo, a community organization in Puerto Rico, recently released a study that outlines how more people can be brought into the fold with “microgrids” — groups of solar panels and batteries that serve entire districts or neighborhoods, not just individual buildings.
In 2023, Casa Pueblo launched one of Puerto Rico’s first microgrids in the tranquil mountain town of Adjuntas. The initiative has since expanded to include five small systems in Adjuntas that serve a handful of residences and 15 businesses, including La Conquista Laundry. Nicky Vázquez, who owns the laundromat, said he’s seen an 80% reduction in his electricity bill and had no power outages since joining the microgrid in mid-2025.
“Now I have stability, I don’t run out of power, and I can continue to provide service,” Vázquez said in a statement provided by Casa Pueblo.
Yesterday’s Super Bowl was hardly the first time that Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, has spoken out about Puerto Rico’s power struggles. Last April, when the territory was once again plunged into darkness, he asked on social media: “¿Cuando vamos a hacer algo?” When are we going to do something?
When I first met John Holbrook at his office in northeastern Kentucky, the region seemed to be on the cusp of a revival. It was a scorching summer day in 2024, and Century Aluminum was considering building an enormous smelter in this corner of Appalachia — one that would create thousands of jobs in an area where employment was steadily drying up.
Holbrook, who heads the Tri-State Building and Construction Trades Council, called the $5 billion project a “life-changing” opportunity. He’d joined a coalition of labor organizers, environmentalists, and local officials who supported Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s attempt to hammer out an agreement to supply Century’s new smelter with clean electricity.
Two weeks ago, Century finally announced its plans. The Chicago-based manufacturer said it will build an aluminum plant in Oklahoma instead, in partnership with Emirates Global Aluminium. The jointly developed facility will be America’s first new smelter since 1980 — and the largest in the country — if completed as planned by the end of the decade.
“It’s very disappointing for the Kentucky craftspeople that I represent,” Holbrook said recently on a video call from his office in Ashland, which was blanketed in ice from a major winter storm. “It’s tough,” he added. “But we are resilient people.”
The news of Century’s decision had barely sunk in for Kentuckians when the company made another surprising announcement.
Last week, Century said it had sold its idled Hawesville smelter in western Kentucky to a data center company, squashing any possibility that the aluminum plant would be restarted. The developer, TeraWulf, will now have access to the site’s 480 megawatts of existing grid capacity for bitcoin mining and high-performance computing — tasks that are less sensitive to power prices than smelting aluminum.
When Century shut down production in Hawesville in 2022, cutting more than 600 jobs, the company pointed to “skyrocketing energy costs” as the primary reason.
Energy has always been the Achilles’ heel of smelters.
The facilities consume tremendous amounts of electricity to transform raw materials into a versatile metal that’s used in cars, planes, power cables, solar panels, and beverage cans. Producers must secure long-term contracts with utilities for affordable, reliable power in order to compete in global markets. But those deals are hard to come by, and smelters that rely on fossil fuel–heavy grids are particularly vulnerable to spikes in coal and gas prices.
For its new smelter, Century had been scouting locations where it could access not only competitive rates but also ample supplies of carbon-free electricity. In 2024, the company was awarded up to $500 million from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy to build a “modern, low-emission” facility as part of a broader federal effort to demonstrate cleaner manufacturing technologies for domestic industries.
It’s unclear whether the terms of Century’s grant have changed under the Trump administration, which is propping up aging coal plants as it works to block renewable-energy projects. But Century recently pointed to Oklahoma’s abundant wind generation and solar power potential in explaining its decision to partner with Emirates Global Aluminium on a smelter near Tulsa.
“Oklahoma is very well located, from a total energy perspective,” Matt Aboud, Century’s senior vice president of strategy and business development, said during a Feb. 2 panel at the S&P Global Aluminum Symposium in Miami.
“Yes, this administration is very much promoting fossil fuels and very much de-emphasizing renewables. But you have to take a 30-to-50-year horizon,” he said. “Ultimately, to really operate a smelter here [in the U.S.], you need an energy strategy that incorporates all the different fuel mixes.”
Aboud didn’t mention Kentucky. But for clean energy advocates, the decision to build in Oklahoma and not the Bluegrass State felt like an indictment of Kentucky’s power system. Coal-fired power plants supplied 67% of the state’s electricity generation in 2024, and gas plants generated another 26%. Hydroelectric dams provided most of the rest, though dozens of solar projects are in development, including ones atop old mining sites.
“Kentucky needs to learn from this and understand that our infrastructure, too, is an economic development tool,” said Elisa Owen, a Louisville-based senior energy organizer with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “We cannot remain invested in 19th-century energy if we want to attract 21st-century business. It’s just as simple as that.”
She said her focus now is ensuring that Century’s last smelter in the state, Sebree, continues operating for years to come. That means pressuring state officials and legislators to usher more renewables onto the grid. “If we understand that Century needs clean energy to be viable in the United States, then that is a story we can tell in Kentucky,” she said. “The Oklahoma smelter snafu needs to be a wake-up call.”
Gov. Beshear, a Democrat, stressed the need to diversify Kentucky’s energy mix in response to Century’s Oklahoma pivot. But GOP state legislators in recent years have adopted measures — Senate Bills 4 and 349 — that are designed to prolong the life of fossil-fueled power plants and make it harder to build renewable energy projects in their place. Opponents of the rules, including investor-owned utilities and manufacturing groups, have warned that the restrictions will jeopardize grid reliability and increase energy costs.
The Kentucky Resources Council and a coalition of other nonprofit groups commissioned an independent study to examine the lawmakers’ claims that relying on fossil fuels is the only way to ensure an affordable, reliable grid. The analysis, by Current Energy Group, found that Kentucky is presently pursuing a high-cost, high-risk path by keeping uneconomic coal plants running and hamstringing efforts to pursue alternatives.
Researchers identified the “least-cost” strategy as one that involves building renewable energy capacity, deploying energy storage, and adding demand-side resources like energy-efficiency programs and rooftop solar to reduce pressure on the utility grid. Using these cleaner resources to replace coal-fired power could save Kentucky customers $2.6 billion by 2050, according to the report, published in December.
This approach is also considered the lowest risk, given that a costly, dirty grid threatens to push out more industries, and since it leaves utilities vulnerable should the state or country ever decide to penalize carbon-dioxide emissions, said Byron Gary, an attorney at the Kentucky Resources Council who helped spearhead the report.
He said that the analysis didn’t include Century’s new smelter when modeling the state’s future power demand. But it did assume that some of the data centers proposed for Kentucky will get built, further increasing the need for carbon-free, lower-cost electricity resources — “which Kentucky clearly doesn’t have right now,” Gary said.
Pro-coal policymakers have framed the AI boom as a godsend for Kentucky’s long-suffering mining industry, as the massive facilities will need lots of around-the-clock power. For now, though, the biggest winner seems to be fossil gas. Last fall, state lawmakers gave Kentucky’s largest utility approval to spend $3 billion on building 1.3 gigawatts’ worth of new gas power capacity to serve future hyperscalers.
Still, that power likely won’t be online anytime soon, given order backlogs: Just getting the turbines needed for new gas plants can take three to five years. By contrast, large-scale solar and wind projects represent the lowest-cost and fastest path to add power to the grid, experts say.
Many residents are pushing back against data centers over concerns of how the megaprojects will affect farmland and raise living costs and electricity prices. For environmentalists who were hoping for a new green smelter, or who were surprised by Hawesville’s rebirth as a server farm, the tech infrastructure is little consolation.
Lane Boldman, executive director of the Kentucky Conservation Committee, said she doesn’t think that data centers will revitalize the state’s hard-hit industrial and mining communities in the same way that the Department of Energy had initially intended when awarding Century’s $500 million smelter grant.
“What the Biden administration had been trying to do with a lot of these grants was not just to provide economic development or drive cleaner technology but also to do something to restore communities that had been working in the energy sector before, so that they’re not abandoned,” she said.
“You want to be able to bring the communities along in that transition,” she added. “And what they will now get instead is either nothing or a data center, and that just wasn’t the plan.”
Holbrook, for his part, said he welcomes the potential influx of data centers in Kentucky and the regions of Ohio and West Virginia that his tristate labor council represents. As he sees it, the multibillion-dollar developments could provide well-paying construction jobs for the next decade and beyond as tech companies expand their footprints.
“We’re trying to embrace it, and we want to be at the table and building these campuses,” he said. “You kind of have to dance with the person that brought you. So that’s how we are with this situation.”
This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.
“🚨Single. Largest. Deregulatory. Action. EVER. Incoming: TOMORROW!”
That quote comes from an X post made by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday. Sure enough, the next day, Zeldin officially unveiled the subject of this WrestleMania-esque hype: The Trump administration has revoked the scientific basis for the federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in America.
For 16 years, a scientific determination known as the “endangerment finding” has served as the backbone of U.S. policies to reduce emissions, allowing the EPA to put limits on planet-warming and health-harming pollution from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources of greenhouse gases.
There’s no doubt this will go to the courts. In fact, the finding itself has its roots in the legal system. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — but only if the agency found that the gases were a threat to public health and welfare. In 2009, the EPA furnished overwhelming evidence in support of that point.
As The New York Times reports, a court battle seems to be precisely what the Trump administration wants. That would allow its lawyers to try to convince the conservative-majority Supreme Court to overturn the 2007 decision, thus dealing a more lasting blow to climate policy, as opposed to revoking the endangerment finding, which a Democratic administration would swiftly reverse.
There’s a reason the administration is relying on a legal strategy rather than contesting the science, Inside Climate News points out: The Trump EPA’s attempts to argue with the climate science have been “laughed out of the room,” Meredith Hankins, legal director for NRDC’s federal climate program, told the publication. (This has not stopped top Trump officials like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum from insisting on Fox News, in between breathless praise of “beautiful, clean coal,” that CO2 is merely plant food.)
Environmental advocates unanimously blasted the decision, highlighting how it would not only harm efforts to fight climate change, but threaten public health and affordability, too.
“Most people have never heard of this safeguard — the ‘endangerment’ finding — but repealing it sends a clear message: this government doesn’t care,” David Widawsky, U.S. director of research group World Resources Institute, said in a statement. “The bottom line is that repealing these protections will make everyday life more expensive, more risky and more uncertain for Americans.”
A quick analysis from the research firm Rhodium Group attempted to quantify the exact impact the decision will have on U.S. climate efforts. It found that national emissions will still fall even if the finding is permanently repealed, thanks to the rapid growth of cheap clean energy, but that decarbonization will be more sluggish.
Put simply, repealing the endangerment finding will slow climate progress at the exact moment the world needs it to speed up.
Coal gets another wave of federal support
The federal government unleashed another raft of pro-coal moves this week, aimed at keeping aging power plants running past their prime.
First, on Tuesday, the EPA granted coal-plant owners an extension on cleaning up toxic coal ash. The EPA had previously required owners to start cleaning up inactive coal ash storage sites — which can leech dangerous pollutants into groundwater — by mid-2029, but now they’ll have until early 2032.
The same day, the Tennessee Valley Authority — the federally owned utility whose board is now packed with Trump appointees — announced plans to keep two of its four coal-fired power plants running instead of retiring them in 2035.
And to wrap up the week, Trump ordered the Defense Department to buy more coal-fired power and announced that the Department of Energy would award $175 million to upgrade several aging coal plants. (The details on how this will work are … fuzzy.)
Puerto Rico’s grid crisis reaches a Super Bowl–size audience
If you watched Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance on Sunday, you saw a swirling celebration of Puerto Rican culture — and a statement about the island’s fragile power grid.
After a few minutes graced by Lady Gaga, a real wedding, and people dressed as sugarcane, things quite literally turned dark. As Bad Bunny sang his 2022 song“El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), he and some dancers climbed electric poles as the lights flickered and sparks flew.
It was a high-profile reminder that Puerto Rico’s power grid has been in shambles since 2017’s Hurricanes Irma and Maria, Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci reports. Even without major weather events, Puerto Rican utility customers face an average of 27 hours of power grid interruptions each year — and recent Trump administration cuts aren’t helping. Distributed solar and battery systems have shown promise in keeping the lights on and power costs low, but with federal assistance stripped back, most residents are still unable to tap in.
Spinning up success: Offshore wind performed as well as gas power plants and better than coal in January, shoring up the Northeast’s power grid through a brutal cold spell. (Canary Media)
The offshore wind fight continues: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says the Trump administration plans to appeal five rulings that allowed offshore wind farm construction to continue. (Bloomberg)
Natural gas disconnect: Experts say the Trump administration’s push to expand natural gas exports doesn’t mesh with its promise to curb skyrocketing power prices back in the U.S. (Canary Media)
Coal’s mounting cost: The net cost of keeping a Michigan coal plant open has reached $135 million since President Trump ordered the facility to stay online in May 2025. (MLive)
Powerful pivot: At least 10 North American EV battery plants are being revamped to instead produce grid batteries for energy storage systems. (Financial Times)
Renewables under attack: A bill making its way through Ohio’s legislature would essentially ban wind and solar development in the state — one of several similar attempts around the U.S. (Canary Media)
Heat-pump troubleshooting: Icy crusts kept some heat pumps from performing their best during recent bouts of extreme cold, but experts recommend owners take a few easy steps ahead of storms to keep their systems running. (Canary Media)
Data center crackdown: The White House has reportedly drafted a pact with tech giants that would have them make public commitments to ensure that their data centers don’t raise household power prices, stress water supplies, or hurt grid reliability. (Politico)
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