Polluters Get A Presidential Exemption From The Law
Also: our take on the public debate over the “abundance agenda.”
Smog in California and Alabama photographed by the brand new Environmental Protection Agency in 1972. The red-orange color of the smog in the photo on the right was characteristic of smoke from the chimneys of the U.S. Steel Corporation.
Are you a highly polluting industrial facility? Maybe a coal-fired power plant, or a coke oven, or a chemical manufacturer, or a commercial sterilizer? Do your neighbors complain about the eye-watering, throat-choking clouds that billow from your stacks? Are you tired of being the bad guy just because your operations emit arsenic, ethylene oxide, mercury, and lead into the air and water, which can cause cancer, brain defects, and other illnesses?
Well, President Trump has got your back. He’s set up a hotline for patriotic polluters like you. If you email airaction@epa.gov, you can request a presidential exemption from a whole host of hazardous air pollution regulations that the Biden administration passed implementing the Clean Air Act.
People who think it’s repugnant that polluters get presidential carte blanche while legal residents are getting disappeared should definitely not give the Trump administration a piece of their mind at the email address above… with an email subject line along the lines of “Presidential Exemption: National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: All Facilities”...
Sarcasm aside, we hope that the Environmental Defense Fund’s Freedom of Information Act request seeking the names of the facilities that decide to take up Trump on this devastatingly irresponsible offer gets answered soon, because we intend to make sure people know which companies want a license to poison people.
Who’s Afraid Of The Clean Air Act?
The Clean Air Act is under attack, my colleague Toni Aguilar Rosenthal wrote for The American Prospect a few weeks ago in a must-read overview of how industry players have fought the law since its inception for creating a “bureaucratic burden” and imposing a heavy financial cost to clean up their act. Yet the law has been extraordinarily successful in its fifty year run.
“Between 1970 and 2018, the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 74 percent,” according to the same Environmental Protection Agency that Trump’s appointees are puppeteering to reverse these gains. “This progress occurred while the U.S. economy continued to grow, Americans drove more miles and population and energy use increased.”
The enormous historical success of the Clean Air Act is not a reason for complacency. Over the last two decades, wildfires intensified by climate change have caused a serious decline in overall air quality in the American West. Wildfires are granted an exemption from the Clean Air Act as an exceptional event, even as they are now more routine than exceptional. “As a result, wildfire smoke is leading to a growing divergence between actual and regulatory air quality,” a 2025 Environmental Science & Technology study found.
Rising temperatures are also fueling a feedback loop in which increased air conditioner usage increases demand for electricity from polluting power plants. Power sector emissions are higher than ever, even with the rapid growth in solar and wind power, because overall electricity demand is up. These new feedback loops, combined with polluting industries’ sustained opposition to being regulated, means that the fate of the Clean Air Act’s wins is far from settled. But the history of the law demonstrates that regulating the excesses of industry is not, in fact, an economic killer.
The real economic killer promises to be climate change. But some firms are looking for ways to capitalize on our impending disasters. As Corbin Hiar reported for E&E News on Monday, big banks are seeking out possibilities for profiting from what they predict to be “catastrophic warming” this century:
“‘We now expect a 3°C world,’ Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing ‘recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.’
“The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.”
Where was this apocalyptic prediction disclosed? In a report on the bright future for air conditioning stocks. “A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.” I can only think of this tragically evergreen cartoon from 2012, the year that the climate change-intensified Hurricane Sandy caused over $60 billion in damages:
Assessing The Abundance Agenda
All of this disaster capitalism segues rather neatly into my critique of the “abundance agenda,” which I outlined in more detail for The American Prospect last week. If you’ve been on political Twitter or Bluesky, you’ve likely seen the “abundance” discourse, and perhaps are wondering what all the fuss is about. We’ve collected some of our main work scrutinizing the agenda here.
In short, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, influential writers and podcasters at The New York Times and The Atlantic/The Ringer, just came out with a book called Abundance that is causing quite a bit of political debate. Abundance didn’t come from nowhere. Over the past few years, a growing cohort of supply-side liberals, many of whom are national political commentators, have essentially reworked the longstanding right-wing argument that the regulatory state needs to be disempowered to increase the speed of building infrastructure.
During the Biden administration, this meant various abundance-aligned pundits sided with coal baron Senator Joe Manchin, against a broadly unified environmental coalition, to back compromise legislation that would expedite both dirty and clean energy permitting. The eventual outcome, packaged as part of a debt ceiling deal, put page and time limits on federal environmental review and overrode judicial review and local opposition to the fracked gas pipeline, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, in Manchin’s home state. The sting of this “dirty deal” has not been forgotten.
Libertarian and other center-right institutions, from Institute for Progress to the Koch network, are also pushing the abundance agenda with their own spins on it. There has been a good deal of cross-pollination between the center-left and center-right thinkers on abundance. “The ‘Abundance’ bros have arrived! And the MAGA bros should be excited!” James Pethokoukis, author of The Conservative Futurist, opined last week in The Washington Post.
While Klein and Thompson’s Abundance aligns with progressive interests in plenty of places, like funding scientific research, their commitment to framing the inefficiencies of government as mainly a byproduct of progressive constraints on government abuses creates a serious blindspot. That blindspot includes how conservative politicians, from far-right Republicans to corporate Democrats (they incorrectly treat “Democrats” and “progressives” as more or less synonymous), align with industry interests to gut state capacity and divert state resources to subsidize private profit at the public’s expense.
Punching left at economic populists while right-wing kleptocrats seize and redirect government resources to enrich themselves is…certainly an interesting choice of priorities. Klein and Thompson undoubtedly would have preferred that their book be published during a Harris transition, when it may have been easier to ignore the elephant in the room. Now that elephant is, well, retweeting them.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk tweeted a video of Ezra Klein talking to Jon Stewart about the convoluted approval process for Biden’s rural broadband program. The problem with blaming that on Democrats is that those convoluted conditions were required by GOP Senators. (In a ridiculously overt demonstration of why overlooking corporate greed obscures the picture, Musk is now trying to rewrite the rules of that broadband program to funnel money to his company Starlink.)
“Musk is now amplifying this deeply misleading clip,” wrote Bharat Ramamurti, former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, in a heated post. “Klein implies that Dems got in a room and unilaterally decided on this lengthy process. That is false. This process came out of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and was largely at the insistence of *GOP Senators* as a condition for their votes.”
“There’s an interesting potential critique here about how corporate interests, acting through the GOP, try to stop government progress by adding complexity to new programs,” Ramamurti continued. “But that wouldn’t square with Klein’s abundance thesis about the left.”
We’ll have more to say in coming weeks about the ideological commitments of the abundance agenda and its bipartisan evangelists. But one point that I wasn’t able to make in my review, which I think bears saying, is that the overbroadness of the abundance agenda itself impedes a clear understanding of its strengths and limitations. Abundance advocates generally diagnose a common malady (too much red tape) and prescribe a common fix across wildly different policy areas and levels of government. If we’re talking about federal pipeline regulation, that’s one thing; if we’re talking about building housing in San Francisco, that’s quite another. Talking about both in the same breath obscures a great deal of nuance, and as always, the devil is in the details.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
DOGE Agent: Christopher Stanley
Revolving Door Project Decries Trump’s Assault On Federal Employees’ Labor Rights
What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?
There Is No DeJoy In Mudville, Or In The Postal Service Either
'Fall in Line or Else': Latest Trump Order Seen as Message to Workers
Silencing Silent Spring, chilling! Read this in Jr High and it changed my thinking for the rest of my life. You can say what you want but Truth will Always win out! We know it in our guts!