This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.
The Trump administration’s attempt to circumvent tightened emissions standards that the president’s predecessor adopted for coal-fired power plants has generated a lawsuit with ramifications for Montana’s largest power plant.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved June 11 to reverse the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard rule that the Biden administration implemented last year to reduce airborne emissions of heavy metals and soot when coal is burned to create electricity.
In a press release that day, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the rule implemented by former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as an attempt to “regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence” because those energy sources don’t “align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry.”
The repeal attempt comes two months after Zeldin granted Colstrip, the coal-fired plant in eastern Montana, a short-term exemption from the rule using a provision of federal law relating to “national security” interests. NorthWestern Energy CEO Brian Bird, who has negotiated deals with other utilities in Washington to double his utility’s ownership in the 40-year-old plant, praised the EPA for the exemption when it was announced.
“This relief means our Montana customers will not be burdened with hundreds of millions of dollars of costs to comply with a new regulation that would only marginally increase the Colstrip Plant’s air toxics efficiency,” Bird wrote in an April press release.
Both the rule rollback EPA announced last week and a lawsuit environmental groups filed the following day to halt the exemptions have been widely anticipated as Trump and his agency heads work to prop up the increasingly uneconomic coal-fired power industry over the objection of climate and public health groups.
Montana Environmental Information Center Executive Director Anne Hedges said in a June 12 press release about the lawsuit that Colstrip is a national outlier because it lacks the pollution control technology the emissions rule requires.
“Harming human health to eke out a bit more shareholder profit from a coal plant — especially one that is the nation’s dirtiest for toxic emissions and is frequently broken when we need it most — is misguided, harmful and expensive,” Hedges said. “Perhaps the billionaires in charge don’t care about human health or their electricity bills, but everyday Montanas sure do.”
The EPA also moved to repeal a rule addressing the climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions stemming from coal combustion. That rule, which also has major implications for the coal industry, wasn’t set to go into effect until 2039.
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