OUR DAILY THREAD: Trump's Hooking Us On Coke
The air that they don't have to breathe
THE SET-UP: It sometimes feels like the 20th Century didn’t happen.
Here we are a quarter of the way into the 21st Century and the US is openly pursuing a 19th Century-style colonial foreign policy. Trump also dusted-off the Gilded Age’s tariffs as part of a strange gambit to reshape international trade along woefully anachronistic lines. And he seems desperate to reestablish expensive, dirty coal as a load-bearing source of electricity for decades to come.
That’s in spite of the availability of devices that literally turn sunlight into usable electricity. But that’s a market Trump has handed to China. Given their market share and their manufacturing capacity, it may be too late to compete. But solar is a technology and breakthroughs, particularly in batteries and storage, are sure to come with increasing rapidity in an economy that invests in the tech.
That’s not the United States … at least for the next few years.
Still, rumors of renewables’ death may be greatly exaggerated … particularly when the rumors come from the world’s greatest exaggerator. What is not in question is the environmental price many Americans will end up paying after couple more years of policies like this:
Under the Biden-era rule, coke plants were supposed to start meeting new limits on leaks from the lids and doors of ovens that heat coal. They would also have had to monitor for benzene at their property lines and take steps to lower emissions of the carcinogen if they exceeded certain levels. Compliance deadlines were set for July 2025.
The Trump administration, which has sought to revive the coal industry, intervened. Last year, it invited hundreds of industrial plants, including coke plants such as Clairton’s, to seek presidential waivers from nine separate rules issued in 2024 by the EPA.
Then Trump in November went further, granting all coke plants a two-year compliance break.
But, as Kaiser Health News explained, this coke doesn’t come with a smile, nor would anyone but a sociopath be interested in sharing it with the world. It’s a “carbon-rich fuel” used “in blast furnaces to produce iron”:
It’s a dirty operation. The process leads to hazardous emissions of benzene, a carcinogen that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can lead to anemia and leukemia, as well as sulfur dioxide, which can trigger severe asthma.
The Clairton operation has had repeated problems with its emissions and operations, including fatal explosions and excess releases of toxic chemicals. The plant has received more than $56 million in fines from the Allegheny County Health Department since 2022, stemming largely from a fire in 2018 that led to high emissions, and violated the Clean Air Act in each of the last 12 quarters, with the last compliance monitoring in July 2025, according to the EPA.
Alas, the troubled Clairton plant is just one of the eleven coal-fired plants Trump is resuscitating:
The situation with the Clairton coke plant and the others granted exemptions from regulations underscores the potential public health risks. Six of the 11 factories had “high priority” violations of the Clean Air Act as of last May, according to a KFF Health News analysis. Five coke oven plants logged major violations every quarter for at least three years straight.
And what will these exemptions bring?
Sadly, Clairton is the canary:
Pediatric allergist Deborah Gentile looked into asthma rates among 1,200 children who attended school near major pollution sites in the area — including students at Clairton Elementary School. They had nearly triple the national rate of asthma, with the highest rate among African American youth, according to the study she led.
…and…
A follow-up study found children with asthma living near the coke plant had an 80% higher chance of missing school when sulfur dioxide pollution was elevated.
It only gets worse from there..
Clairton has an age-adjusted cancer death rate of 170 per 100,000 people, higher than the broader county’s rate of 150 deaths per 100,000 people, based on a KFF Health News analysis of state and federal data.
…and…
The American Lung Association in 2025 gave the county an F rating for its particle pollution levels. PennEnvironment, an environmental group that was party to a settlement with U.S. Steel involving the Clairton plant, says the coke operation caused 1.1 million pounds of toxic releases in 2021, which amounted to 60% of all such releases in the county that year.
Overall, the air pollution generated by Allegheny County’s concentration of industrial plants has been “linked to increased deaths, chronic heart disease, and adverse birth outcomes.” It was also “ranked in the top 1% of counties in the nation for cancer risk from stationary industrial air pollutants in a 2018 EPA report.”
Of course, none of that dissuaded Trump or any of the fox-like appointees he’s put in charge of the EPA’s henhouse. - jp
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https://www.semafor.com/article/04/14/2026/the-iran-war-sent-energy-prices-soaring-china-is-stepping-in
Trump’s EPA to ignore economic benefits of clean air, focusing only on costs to polluters
https://scienceline.org/2026/04/trumps-epa-to-ignore-economic-benefits-of-clean-air/
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https://www.selc.org/press-release/coalition-sues-trump-epa-for-failure-to-implement-life-saving-national-soot-standard/
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