Late in March, the Environmental Protection Agency offered up a fun opportunity for members of the “regulated community”: send an email, with a template helpfully provided, asking for an exemption from various EPA regulations for up to two years. And lo, just a few weeks later, the emails bore fruit: a total of 47 companies now have permission to keep running almost 70 coal-fired power plants without properly mitigating emissions of things like arsenic, mercury, and benzene. Who says this administration isn’t functional!
The list of power plants, posted to an EPA website this week, spans the country and includes some of the most notorious polluters around. Take the Colstrip plant in Montana — it emits more bad stuff than any other plant in the country, and now it gets to keep doing so for two more years at least. Or how about Coal Creek Station in North Dakota, recently seen getting rejected by the Biden-era EPA for a permit to keep dumping coal ash into a failing pit. But maybe the most pithy example is the exemption for Panther Creek Pyropower in Pennsylvania, where they recently started burning tires along with coal in order to power a crypto mining operation; they have been sued to try and reduce the pollution they were generating, and now will continue to generate for just a bit longer.
The total number of plants — 66 — is significant as well. According to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, only 141 coal-fired power plants are still operating in the US. That means those simple, templated emails are propping up almost 47 percent of the entire coal fleet, the fleet that is responsible for half a million deaths just between 1999 and 2020.
These aren’t all just mom-and-pop energy companies claiming the hardship of cleaning up will put them out of business. Included on the list are plants owned by behemoths like Dominion Energy — the 10th-biggest electric utility by market capitalization, with revenue of $14.5 billion in 2024 — and Southern Company — second-biggest, $26.7 billion. Let’s thank our lucky stars such companies won’t be forced to avoid giving a kid leukemia for a few years.
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