“Trump boosted half of US coal plants with taxpayer dollars and ‘free passes to pollute’, report says”, 31 October 2026 (Photo via The Guardian — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Start with the court file, because somebody already did the arithmetic for us.
On September 11 a federal appeals court threw out the Energy Department's use of emergency powers to hold open a coal plant in Michigan. Ted Kelly, the Environmental Defense Fund's lead counsel for US clean energy, said the court had rejected the administration's nationwide push forcing unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money to stay online. The phrase that traveled was old, expensive, and dirty. That is not name-calling. Old is a date. Expensive is a number. Dirty is a measurement. A court looked at all three and said an emergency is not the line item you use to keep the lights on at a business that cannot pay for its own lights.…
…(cont) Seven weeks later the same organization stopped arguing and started counting, which is the part of this job I like. There are 184 operating coal plants connected to the grid. Ninety of them have received support from this administration — cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates. The cash side totals $950 million. The exemption side totals nothing at all in dollars, which is the convenience of an exemption: it is an expense that shows up in somebody else's lungs and never in the appropriation.
So let me be precise about the gap, hon. One plant was told no in September. Ninety plants were carried in the count published yesterday. The ruling did not shrink the program by a plant; it narrowed which drawer the program gets filed in.
Which brings me to the drawer. On September 29 Senator Susan Collins, who chairs Appropriations, confirmed that the White House had tapped money earmarked for Customs and Border Protection to pay for advertisements promoting the president — at least $1.5 million in federal funds. On October 6, after the outcry, the president said he would cover those ads with money he raised for MAGA Inc., and called them a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.
Reconcile the two entries and the shape is plain. A $1.5 million line got a public correction in seven days. A $950 million line, for plants a court described as old, expensive, and dirty, got a report from an environmental group and no correction at all. Both sums came out of the same Treasury in the same autumn. Only one of them was small enough to be embarrassing.
That is the whole table. There is money. It is posted to a column with coal in it.
🍺
“A federal court said out loud that these plants are old, expensive, and dirty and can't survive without an emergency order, and the response was to do it at ninety plants instead of one. Nobody handed me $950 million for being unprofitable — when I can't cover my costs the lights go off, and when they can't cover theirs the government writes the check and hands them a pass on the pollution besides. And the same White House found ad money in the border account to tell me what a great job it's doing.”
“These are reliability payments, grid reliability, you want the air conditioning in August, don't you — did I say handouts? That doesn't sound like me, that's the report's word. And the exemptions aren't spending at all, not one dollar appropriated, so really the figure is smaller than they're saying, and anyway the ad money's being paid back, which is more than you can say for most of Washington, so I'd call that a pretty clean ledger.”
Environmental Defense Fund analysis shows administration handed out $950m and Clean Air Act exemptions It’s a good time to be a coal plant in the US. The Trump administration has given support to almost half of the nation’s coal plants, helping them to continue operating despite economic and regulatory headwinds, according to a new…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
