A home sits near the Gen. James Gavin Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant, April 14, 2025, in Point Pleasant, W.Va.| AP

WASHINGTON—Cough, cough, hack. And more global warming, too. 

That’s what Americans—and potentially the rest of the world, given prevailing winds—will face as a result of pro-pollution President Donald Trump’s latest mandate. Trump’s EPA now says 8,000 big polluters, especially coal-burning power plants, plus steel mills and oil refineries, don’t have to report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions anymore.

Needless to say, the BlueGreen Alliance, the union-environmental coalition the Steelworkers co-founded, isn’t happy. Indeed, months ago, BGA Executive Director Jason Walsh forecast Trump Environmental Protection Administrator Lee Zeldin’s September 18 announcement.

Walsh’s prediction occurred when Zeldin announced EPA had no regulatory justification for even curbing greenhouse gas emissions. He followed it up by yanking long-time rules—which U.S. automakers have followed—reducing carbon emissions from trucks, cars and SUVs. 

In the latest case, corporations that produce the emissions, especially coal-fired power plants, lobbied against reporting what and how much belch out of their tall stacks. The reports and accompanying control measures, such as scrubbers, eat into capitalist profits. 

“The EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment,” Walsh reminded viewers at the end of July, when Zeldin unveiled a preliminary move, dumping EPA’s 16-year-old “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, and thus should be reduced, as the Democratic Biden administration set out to do. 

“Zeldin is undermining that mission by denying the real and present danger of greenhouse gas pollution confirmed by decades of science,” Walsh continued. “Instead of focusing on protecting workers and communities from the impacts of climate change, the administration continues to roll back efforts to fight climate change and grow clean energy and clean manufacturing solutions that are better for our health, workers, and the American economy.”

Zeldin is “taking away the practical and material capacity of the federal government to do the basic elements of climate policymaking,” Joseph Goffman, head of the EPA’s office of air and radiation during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.

Walsh added that the end of reports of greenhouse gas emissions would particularly affect communities and workers of color, who are more likely—due to lower incomes and other forms of discrimination that push proportionally more of those workers into power plant jobs—to live near those high GHG emitters.

“Half of all Black people in the U.S. live in areas where climate change increases the risks of extreme heat, hurricanes, and flooding,” Walsh noted.

Zeldin announced his latest GHG decision on the evening of Friday, September 18, timing it to miss evening news cycles and to hit front pages—and TV shows—on a weekend day when most people relax, shop, do chores, and play with their kids. In other words, they’re not paying attention to the EPA, the news or to pollution.

The Trump-Zeldin GHG decision, now open for comment for 47 days, is the latest of a series of pro-corporate, anti-environmental GOP Trump regime moves. The duo claims they want to encourage U.S. industrial growth. 

But they ignore evidence that curbing greenhouse gas emissions not only battles climate change but improves public health, forgoes health spending over time, and produces tens of thousands of new jobs. Biden mandated that new “green job” facilities be built union, too. 

Wiped out green jobs

Instead, Trump has wiped out such “green jobs,” most recently 1000 union jobs constructing an electricity-producing wind farm in Long Island Sound off Rhode Island and Connecticut, and its associated shore facilities.

Zeldin also yanked future required GHG reports, after the one for calendar 2024, tentatively scheduled for release on September 22, five months late. Zeldin claimed the reports add nothing to general knowledge about the emissions and their impact, while costing corporations $2.4 billion yearly to comply.

The 2023 GHG report showed a 2% decline in emissions, compared to 2022. Total U.S. GHG emissions declined by 17% since 2005. When EPA missed the April 15 deadline, Environmental Defense—formerly the Environmental Defense Fund—sued to get the raw data on polluters, won, and published it in an interactive map, plant by plant.

The map shows the entire Ohio River Valley, on both banks, is literally lined with pollution emitters all the way from “The Point” in Pittsburgh, where the Ohio begins, to Cairo, Ill., where it meets the Mississippi River. The Point is where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio. And the line of emitters continues northwards along the Allegheny almost all the way to Erie, Pa. There are also clusters of GHG emitters in the Chicago suburbs and in northern New Jersey, from urbanized Bergen County to one in rural Sussex County, among other areas.

Zeldin, obeying a prior Trump executive order, claimed ending the GHG report would have “no material impact” on EPA’s oversight of GHG emissions.

“The Green House Gas Reporting Program is not directly related to a potential regulation and has no material impact on improving human health and the environment. If finalized, the proposal would remove reporting obligations for most large facilities, all fuel and industrial gas suppliers, and CO2 (carbon dioxide) injection sites,” an official notice says. Carbon dioxide accounts for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Alongside President Trump, EPA continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American Dream,” Zeldin bragged. 

Then he took a shot at his own agency’s career staffers, many of whom he’s fired, by declaring “The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”

There are minor exceptions to EPA’s cancellation: One is that firms that must pay a Waste Emissions Charge, which Congress enacted last year, must still report emissions. Another report reinstates the overall emissions reports by oil and gas pipeline companies and emitters of methane—which is even worse for global warming—in 2034.

Left unsaid: Zeldin himself should know better. As a former Republican congressman from Eastern Long Island, his constituents were victims for years of another impact of power plant emissions. East winds carried sulfuric gases from coal-burning plants over New York and New England. Mixed with water vapor, they became acid rain.  

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