By Kennedy Maize
The Trump administration is working overtime to transmogrify the nation’s dirtiest fuel into what the president calls his “beautiful clean coal.”
The White House has mobilized the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Tennessee Valley authority to boost its vision of restoring coal’s past glory. It isn’t working. 
The EPA last week (May 14) formally proposed rolling back long-standing rules regulating toxic wastewater from coal-fired power plants. The Washington Post summarized the EPA move: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to relax limits that require coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers.”
The latest EPA move on coal plant waste water implements a decision EPA made last year to delay compliance with 2024 Biden administration rules on the wastewater cleanup, making the delay permanent. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin hung the new proposal on the administration’s push to advance artificial intelligence, with its need for abundant electric power. Zeldin said, “The AI and data center revolution is creating an electricity and baseload power demand that cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations.”
A month before proposing the new wastewater rules (April 9), EPA also proposed scrapping prior rules on managing coal ash disposal pits and ponds. That controversial rulemaking is still in process, with an online public meeting scheduled for May 28. Both the coal ash and wastewater proposed rules, if adopted, are sure to draw serious court challenges. Earthjustice, the national environmental law firm, has already challenged EPA’s proposed rules.
Soon after Trump settled in at the White House, he moved to take control of the board of directors and top management at the federal government owned Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s top coal consumers. He was eventually successful and this year TVA reversed plans to shut down two of its largest and oldest coal-fired power plants.
TVA in 2008 was the site of the nation’s largest industrial spill, as a dike at the coal waste pond for its large Kingston coal-fired plant collapsed releasing some 1.1 billion US gallons of coal fly ash slurry, destroying many homes and polluting several rivers, eventually costing TVA some $1 billion in damages. That led to federal regulation of utility of coal ash disposal practices.
During the current EPA coal waste regulatory extravaganza, Inside Climate News (ICN) reported, TVA employees distributed a 35-page pamphlet, source unclear, titled “Know the Facts: Coal Ash,” claiming that mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic chemicals in coal ash are not a health threat. The pamphlet has disappeared from the internet, although the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has circulated hard copies for analysis.
Alliance staffer Tracy O’Neill told ICN “she picked up the booklet from a TVA table at the April 15 public comment session held by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation on the TVA’s coal ash remediation plan for its Cumberland Fossil Plant.”
While dodging the issue of TVA’s provenance for the pamphlet, TVA spokesman Scott Brooks told ICN, “The common narrative around coal ash is not rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today. We owe it to the communities we serve to provide clear, factual information about coal ash, including its constituents, how it is regulated as a non-hazardous solid waste under federal and state regulations, and the many ways it is safely managed and beneficially used.”
EPA’s web site says the agency “is committed to reducing pollution from coal ash, also known as coal combustion residuals, the potentially toxic material left behind after burning coal. Coal ash can contain contaminants known to cause cancer and other serious health effects.”
Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, told ICN the pamphlet included “many deceptive statements. The headline declares that ‘Coal Ash Is Not Hazardous;’ this is simply untrue, The list of coal ash ingredients in the pamphlet omits dangerous metals; this is dishonest.”
Frumkin formerly directed the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over at D.C.’s Forrestal Building, the Department of Energy is continuing its effort to prevent any coal-fired power plants from closing during Trump’s term in office, by claiming an “emergency” linked to bogus threats of weather turmoil (not, of course, related to global warming). The DOE effort has so far targeted five elderly, uneconomic plants, with serial 90-day orders to keep the plants running, although several of them are closed and not generating electricity.
The New York Times reported, “The moves have not come cheaply: Keeping the plants open has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which will be paid by ratepayers.”
Nor is Trump’s coal crusade showing concrete results. DOE’s Energy Information Administration this month reported that solar electric generation from solar exceeded coal power for the first time last year in Texas. Wind has outpaced coal in Texas for at least five years. Natural gas has long been the dominant source of electric generation in Texas followed by wind, then coal, with nuclear the least significant generating source.