Manufacturers call EPA's gutted power-plant pollution rule 'a game changer,' demand more.

…(cont) None did. On Thursday, thirteen days after the Clean Water Act announcement and three days after the power plant rule ended, a trade group arrived at the funeral wearing a suit. Jay Timmons, chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, told Fox News that the EPA's rollback of Biden-era power plant emissions standards was "a game changer" — and then, standing over the open casket, asked for more. Additional permitting reform, he said, was still needed. The dead were barely dressed for viewing and the industry was already filing a request for the next body.

This is how the file grows. A dinner becomes a memo becomes a rule becomes a rollback becomes, at last, a testimonial — each beat quieter than the last, each one somebody else's Thursday. The protections did not fail a stress test or lose a vote. They were declared inconvenient, one at a time, to men who were then invited to say thank you in front of cameras, and it feels like shit to anyone who still fishes the streams this narrows.

Nobody in this story is shocked. That is the arrangement working as intended.

Endangered Species Act protections, Clean Water Act protections, and the power plant emissions rule are survived by the National Association of Manufacturers, which finds them a game changer, and by whatever comes next on the permitting docket.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners stop sending trade associations to cheer at funerals and start asking who is paying for the flowers.