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At Patricia Schuba’s house, the windows are almost always shut. She lives a few miles from one of the top-polluting power plants in the country, in Labadie, Missouri.
“You can actually see the pollution,” said Schuba, president of a community group called Labadie Environmental Organization that has pushed for tighter pollution controls on the Labadie Energy Center for more than 15 years. “It’s like soot coming out of the power plant … There’s times you can even smell it in the air.”
Changes to federal regulations made during the Biden administration were poised to tighten the screws on facilities like the Labadie Energy Center — Missouri’s largest coal plant. Among other reforms, this facility would have faced stiffer limits on spewing mercury and other hazardous substances into the air starting next year. As of 2024, the plant was the fifth-largest emitter of mercury among the country’s power plants.
For residents like Schuba, this was hard-won progress.
Then, after President Donald Trump took office the second time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency excused the Labadie plant and others like it from complying with the tighter regulations until July 2029. Next it made this decision permanent by repealing the Biden-era mercury rule.
The Trump administration says the decision will “ensure affordable, dependable energy for American families and restore American energy dominance.”
Schuba disagrees.
“We feel like we’re being sacrificed,” said Schuba, also a long-time volunteer for the Sierra Club, which is suing over the administration’s move. “We’re being sacrificed for profits of corporations and the energy industry.”
Across the country, so far 200 facilities have received exemptions to stiffer regulations that were crafted by the Biden administration. The regulations were meant to rein in a wide variety of air pollutants linked to cancer and other serious harms to human health. The waivers to nine rules — including the one related to toxic metals like mercury — are part of the second Trump administration’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said the administration is pursuing clean air alongside economic growth.
“Breathing clean air, living on clean land, and drinking clean water are all shared goals, while we also do our part to usher in a Golden Age of American success,” Zeldin said when the agency announced last year that it would reconsider the nine rules.
The White House has said the Biden-era rules didn’t take such real-world challenges into account, putting facilities that underpin the U.S. economy at risk of shutdowns or massive capital investments that might not succeed in meeting the rules anyway.
And some plant owners agree. They say the Trump administration’s exemptions were a much needed reprieve from potential major logistical problems, expensive fixes or higher costs for consumers.
“This prudent approach helped protect customers from paying for significant expenditures that ultimately proved unnecessary,” said Craig Giesmann, Ameren Missouri director of environmental services, in an emailed statement. He added that the company abides by the pre-Biden-era regulations that have already reduced nationwide mercury emissions.
But community groups fighting to make their neighborhoods healthier, safer places, want to breathe clean air free of toxins associated with serious health conditions.
“You’re seeing decades of work being swept away and protections stripped away from communities,” said Nalleli Hidalgo, a community organizer and education liaison for Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS.
Nowhere have companies received more flexibility from the nine rules than Texas, where 28 facilities have received exemptions. Most of these are in coastal cities like Houston, where TEJAS is based.
Many of the area’s industrial facilities are packed into and among neighborhoods of color, Hidalgo said. And these communities are also dealing with decades of discrimination, plus extreme climate events such as flash-flooding.
“It’s just an overwhelming amount of effects that a lot of communities start to face,” she said.
The push for cleaner air
The Trump administration put out its call to companies in the fossil fuels, steel, chemical and other industries last year. It invited companies to seek exemptions to the nine Clean Air Act rules tightened under Biden.
The 2024 mercury rule — that would have applied to the coal plant in Labadie — gave coal plants three years to meet stricter regulations on heavy metals and fine particulate matter by July 2027.
Another rule would have reined in air pollution from coke ovens like those in the Chicago area that process coal into a key ingredient and a fuel for the steel-making industry along Lake Michigan’s shore. Only, those coke ovens received exemptions.
“It’s a kick in the gut,” said Lisa Vallee, organizing director for Just Transition Northwest Indiana, a grassroots environmental group. “Industry is obviously being kind of given the golden ticket here — and community is being forgotten.”
An additional rule promised to cut hazardous emissions related to petrochemical plants. Under Biden, the EPA had said this would reduce smog and benefit children, who are especially vulnerable to substances such as chloroprene and ethylene oxide.
The change was supposed to put an end to the bulk of such emissions from those plants. By the Biden EPA’s own estimates, it was supposed to lower by 96% the number of people who have an elevated cancer risk from living near the plants and breathing in the toxic pollution.
But 70 petrochemical facilities in 17 states have gotten a two-year pass on complying with the tighter regulations. After that, the fate of the regulations is uncertain because the EPA plans to retool them.
The Occidental Chemical Corp in Wichita, Kansas, the Conocophillips Wood River Manufacturing Complex in Roxana, Illinois, and Trinseo’s chemical factory in Midland, Michigan, are a few examples of sites that received flexibility.
Half of the 70 plants are clustered along the Gulf Coast, such as in Houston and an area of southeastern Louisiana known as Cancer Alley after the toll that dense industry has taken on its residents.
In Houston, the grassroots group TEJAS is one plaintiff in a lawsuit over these exemptions. It says the Biden-era changes would have helped neighbors protect themselves from breathing unsafe toxins.
“It would have included the fenceline monitoring,” Hidalgo said, “which is something very important for frontline, fenceline communities.”
The rule requires chemical manufacturers to monitor for six air pollutants at the edge of their properties. The EPA would publish the data to its website and manufacturers would be required to make repairs and improvements if a facility overstepped emissions limits.
The Trump administration is defending the exemptions of petrochemical and other rules against multiple lawsuits.
It says the Biden-era decision to cut down on airborne toxic metal emissions, for example, left corporations navigating an uncertain regulatory landscape, with implications for coal plants in North Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, Texas and other states. And it argues those plants have already made strides in reducing emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants.
Ameren Missouri, one of the companies that received flexibility related to toxic metals, wrote in its application for the waivers that it would “avoid forcing Ameren to make commitments to very costly and cost-ineffective control retrofits that will produce little benefits” at its Labadie Energy Center and the Sioux Energy Center in West Alton, Missouri.
Otherwise, the company said it would struggle to meet the 2027 deadline for complying with tighter emissions, which “could jeopardize national security interests by risking the reliability of the St. Louis, Missouri, electric grid and increasing energy costs for our customers.”
Ameren Missouri also said it would be challenging to design, acquire and install the necessary upgrades for the tighter emissions standard. Shutting down plant units for the installation would also cut into power generation, it said, adding that its plants serve a region that includes military facilities and national defense suppliers.
"The Labadie and Sioux energy centers are critical to maintaining reliability, especially during periods of extreme weather when energy demand is highest,” Giesmann said in the company’s email to Harvest Public Media.
Two trade groups that called for exemptions for chemical manufacturers across the country — the American Chemistry Council and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers — have told the EPA that complying with the tighter rules would cost tens of billions of dollars. Some of the necessary technology isn’t available, they say, and logistical hurdles abound.
“The two-year exemptions that have been granted offer a pathway for relief,” the council said in a statement to Harvest Public Media, adding that it supports “practical rulemaking backed by sound science.”
The trade group said its members continue to improve their environmental performance, but “overly stringent requirements will impede operations associated with important supply chains.”
The chemical manufacturing industry and its products are key to national and economic security, agriculture, public health, semiconductor manufacturing and other industries, the trade group said.
Keeping tabs on the situation
The Environment Defense Fund is one of the many community and environmental groups that took the EPA and Trump to court. Multiple suits target the agency’s various kinds of exemptions. The Fund is a plaintiff in the lawsuit related to the petrochemical rule.
“We think that what the president has done here is illegal,” said Rosalie Winn, the group’s senior director and lead counsel.
The EPA says that the president is allowed by law to issue two-year exemptions to air pollution regulations if it would be in the nation’s interest and companies don’t have access to the technology needed to comply.
The EPA Press Office told Harvest Public Media in an email that the exemptions were the president’s prerogative and the agency wasn’t involved in reviewing them.
But the Environmental Defense Fund says the technology to comply with the tighter controls and monitoring of petrochemical-related emissions already exists and is being used at some facilities.
“There’s a ton of evidence that shows the technology is available,” Winn said. “Many facilities are still complying with these standards.”
The Environmental Defense Fund tracks how many facilities have applied for and received flexibility on the nine Biden-era Clean Air Act rules. It launched an interactive map of the industrial facilities together with the Environmental Integrity Project.
But keeping tabs hasn’t proved easy. The two groups file open records requests for the information and have had to fight in court for some of the documents. To the best of their knowledge, around 400 facilities have applied for some kind of exemption and half have gotten it.
Two steel industry coke ovens have received exemptions in northwest Indiana, where Vallee lives. Another five waiver requests are pending in that area related to emissions from turning iron ore into steel and from manufacturing lime, another key substance for the steel-making process.
Just Transition Northwest Indiana joined a lawsuit over the coke oven exemptions.
“It’s personal in that we really genuinely understand what it means for these regulations to be disregarded,” Vallee said. “They were put in place for a reason, and that was to save lives.”
The group recently commissioned a study from Carnegie Mellon University economist Nicholas Muller. Muller’s research argues that northwest Indiana communities sustain more than $3 billion in public health and economic damages each year from air pollution generated by 20 industrial sites in the region — primarily related to the steel industry.
The study attributes 124 premature deaths annually to Cleveland-Cliffs Burns Harbor alone, one of the country’s biggest integrated steel mills. The company didn’t respond to Harvest Public Media’s request for comment.
Ultimately, Vallee’s group wants to see the densely industrialized corner of Indiana shift toward cleaner energy and technologies while keeping local access to union jobs with fair pay. They want steel mills, for example, to transition away from traditional coal-fired furnaces.
But in the meantime, Vallee said, “there are things that can be done that reduce the amount of pollutants that are going out into the air.” But, she said,the exemptions hamper this.
In Missouri, Schuba fears she and other residents who live near Ameren’s coal-burning power plant in Labadie will pay for Clean Air Act exemptions in the form of more diagnoses of heart and lung conditions or cancer.
“It’s a dirty old plant with limited protections,” she said. “We should be concerned about the risk that this plant poses to all of us.”
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is an environment reporter for Harvest Public Media and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
