President Trump Gives More Coal Plants, Large Industrial Facilities a Pass to Pollute

(Washington, D.C. – July 17, 2025) President Trump signed a series of proclamations this evening that seek to exempt some of the nation’s most dangerous industrial facilities and coal plants from pollution laws – effectively giving them a free pass to put more cancer-causing and toxic substances into our air.    

“President Trump’s callous and dangerous actions would let some of the country’s worst industrial polluters evade compliance with the safeguards that protect Americans from toxic air pollution,” said Vickie Patton, General Counsel for Environmental Defense Fund. “These proclamations put millions of people in harm’s way. They would increase cancer risk and mean more suffering for people – children and adults – in communities across the country. We will vigorously oppose these indefensible and deeply damaging actions.”  

President Trump signed proclamations claiming to exempt some of the largest industrial polluters in the U.S. from protective health and environmental standards, including 53 petrochemical facilities, three coal fired power plants, eight taconite iron ore processing plants, and 39 medical sterilizers. The petrochemical facilities that were granted special exemptions include industrial emitters in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. The coal fired power plants named today follow 68 others that President Trump exempted from life-saving pollution protections earlier this year.  

These industrial facilities emit ethylene oxide, chloroprene, benzene and other extremely hazardous air pollutants that are linked to cancer and cause other serious diseases. 

Earlier this year, EDF and a coalition of health, community, and environmental groups released a new map showing more than 500 facilities that emit toxic or hazardous air pollution and that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited to apply for Presidential exemptions from air pollution limits. Users can identify the facilities the President claimed to exempt today, including information on the number of people who live nearby, how close they are to public schools, and which congressional district they are located in. 

(Click here for the interactive map)

President Trump has already tried to exempt 68 coal-fired power plants from life-saving limits on mercury, arsenic and other highly toxic pollution – an illegal action that would permit more of the pollution that causes brain damage in young children as well as cancer and heart and lung diseases in adults. A coalition of 12 environmental and community groups, including EDF, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging those Presidential exemptions. 

All of these Presidential actions come after EPA Administrator Zeldin issued a sweeping invitation to hundreds of large industrial facilities to apply by email for a pass to pollute.  EPA has not publicly released records related to these requests.  EDF has filed a lawsuit to obtain them.