Trump’s coal crusade is failing

The Trump administration is fighting on two fronts to roll back federal climate rules and prop up coal power, with mixed results. This month the EPA rolled back a Biden-era rule that limited carbon emissions from power plants, arguing it lacks the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases. The move also aims to make it harder for future administrations to write similar rules.

Separately, the administration has been using an old wartime law to order aging coal plants to keep running rather than shut down as planned. But a federal court just rejected one of these orders, telling the Energy Department that its attempt to force a Michigan coal plant to stay open was heavy-handed and had no solid legal basis.

For homeowners, none of this changes anything immediately about your electricity bill, your utility, or available upgrade incentives. It's a signal about the direction of federal energy policy: less pressure on power plants to cut carbon emissions, and an uneven, legally contested push to keep old coal plants online longer than utilities had planned. Whether any of it actually changes what kind of power plants get built or retired over time is still an open question. Separately, new polling on climate messaging found that most Americans respond poorly to the word "crisis," which may shape how these issues get talked about publicly going forward, though that's more about political rhetoric than anything that affects your home directly.