Trump EPA guts standards for waste dumping
Agency relaxes rules targeting coal-fired plants, including biggest polluter on Lake Michigan
Towering above Lake Michigan north of the Wisconsin border, the Oak Creek coal-fired power plant is one of the largest sources of toxic metals dumped into American waterways.
Only six other power plants nationwide released more arsenic, lead, mercury and other metals into lakes and rivers last year, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis of federal records. On the shores of Lake Michigan, no other polluter comes close.
By now the coal plant’s owner should have dramatically reduced its pollution. In 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted stringent limits on metals that stick around in the environment and become more dangerous as they move up the food chain.
But President Donald Trump’s political appointees stalled the regulations soon after taking office in 2017, and they recently gutted the Obama-era standards for Oak Creek and other fossil fuel plants. The Trump EPA’s alternative fails to require the most effective treatment methods, pushes back deadlines and exempts many power plants from doing anything at all.
Buried in the fine print of the Republican administration’s new regulations is a stunning admission: Benefits for energy companies would come at the expense of more than 20 million Americans who drink water and eat fish from lakes and rivers polluted by coal plant discharges.
Low-income Black and Latino communities face disproportionate risks from the pollution, the Trump EPA also acknowledges in its regulatory documents.
“There is just no way anyone can justify that trade-off,” said Betsy Southerland, who led an EPA team that drafted the Obama-era rule and became a vocal critic of the agency after retiring in 2017.
Weaker regulation of power plant wastewater is one of several environmental rollbacks drafted by Trump appointees who formerly worked in the coal industry , a once-dominant source of electricity in steep decline.
As recently as a decade ago, coal accounted for more than half of all electricity generated in the United States. This year its share is expected to drop to just 18% as power companies spurn the fossil fuel in favor of cleaner, lessexpensive natural gas and renewable energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The rapid shift is driving coal companies into bankruptcy, prompting scores of layoffs at coal mines and shaving billions from the balance sheets of coal plant owners.
Industry lobbyists and Trump administration officials blame the Obama EPA for job losses at coal mines and power plants struggling to compete in energy markets. The Utility Water Act Group , an industry trade organization, said the former administration’s wastewater regulations failed “to consider accurately the cumulative costs of EPA’s major rules affecting the utility industry, the coal industry and the communities depending on them.”
Documents filed by the Trump EPA estimate its new regulations will save the industry $140 million and slow the move away from coal-fired electricity.
“Newer, more affordable pollution control technologies and flexibility on the regulation’s phase-in will reduce pollution and save jobs at the same time,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, one of the coal companies that pushed for the rollback.
The purported reductions in pollution could be a mirage, though. Wheeler and other Trump administration officials grounded their regulations on the assumption that investor-owned companies will volunteer to spend millions of dollars upgrading coal plants.
Along with other pollutants, metals are concentrated in ash left behind from the burning of coal and in residue from scrubbers that reduce air pollution.
Power plants generally mix the waste with water and store the slurry in open pits that are gradually emptied into lakes and rivers.
Many of the pits also leach into groundwater tied to underground aquifers. Nationwide, more than 90% of the sites storing coal ash violate EPA health standards, according to a review of industry records by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.
The Obama EPA’s regulations targeted arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and selenium — metals that when ingested through water or food can cause cancer, lower the IQ of children and trigger organ damage and reproductive problems.
Despite dozens of coal plants closing or converting to natural gas during the past three years, the industry is still responsible for about a third of the metals-laden pollution released into water nationally — more than any economic sector.
Indiana led all states with 16,527 pounds of the six metals discharged by coal plants last year, according to industry records filed with the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.
Others in the top five are Texas (7,255 pounds), Michigan (6,348 pounds), Ohio (5,179 pounds) and Georgia (4,901 pounds). Illinois coal plants released 618 pounds during the year.
The 2,165 pounds dumped into Lake Michigan by the Oak Creek coal plant accounted for nearly two-thirds of all discharges into Wisconsin waterways last year, the Tribune analysis found.
During the past decade, the amount of mercury pollution from Oak Creek has steadily increased. Wisconsin officials last year cleared We Energies, the plant’s owner, to release concentrations of the brain-damaging metal nearly three times greater than state law allows.
Brendan Conway, a company spokesman, said permits for Oak Creek include deadlines for improvements required under the Obama-era regulations.
“We are evaluating how this new rule might change additional wastewater treatment technologies we are designing,” Conway said in an email. “However, we believe we are well positioned to meet many of the new … requirements with existing environmental control technologies.”
Eliminating the pollution costs substantially less than it did when the Obama EPA adopted its regulations five years ago, the Trump EPA acknowledges. But Wheeler and his aides chose to require less effective technology that will leave millions of Americans at risk from harmful metals and chemical pollutants, according to complex charts scattered throughout regulatory documents.
Power companies are exempt from even the less stringent requirements at coal plants scheduled to close by 2028.
“They had an opportunity here to protect people at a fraction of the costs we estimated,” said Southerland, the former EPA official. “They just chose not to do so.”
While the Trump administration’s changes will be challenged in court, several power companies already have indefinitely delayed projects intended to comply with the Obama-era regulations.
Northern Indiana Public Service Co. had sought approval from state regulators to charge ratepayers $170 million for wastewater treatment at its Schahfer Generating Station in Jasper County. The company put its project on hold and later announced it will close the coal plant by 2023 as part of a transition to wind and solar power.
Thom Cmar, a lawyer for the nonprofit group EarthJustice, said loopholes in the Trump EPA regulations are intended to benefit a few dozen other coal plants.
“They’re propping up a dying industry,” Cmar said. “But this pollution should have been eliminated a long time ago.”
Three federal judges — two appointed by Trump and another by President George W. Bush — agree government and industry have taken too long to address the threats to public health and the environment.
In an April 2019 decision, the 5th District Court of Appeals judges chided the EPA for allowing energy companies to continue storing waste in leaky pits. The judges noted the agency’s wastewater standards for power plants hadn’t been updated since 1982, “the second year of President Reagan’s first term, the same year that saw the release of the first CD player, the Sony Watchman pocket television, and the Commodore 64 home computer.”