The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday weakened pollution limits for coal-burning power plants, allowing them to release more heavy metals including mercury, a powerful neurotoxin linked to brain damage.
The move was one of many efforts by the Trump administration to revive the declining U.S. coal industry, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that burning coal is harming public health and driving dangerous levels of global warming. Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.
Senior E.P.A. officials announced the move during a trip to the Mill Creek Generating Station, a coal plant in Louisville, Ky., along with Republican lawmakers from the state.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement.
Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. was not eliminating limits on mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal plants. Rather, it was repealing stringent limits that the Biden administration set in 2024 and returning to looser restrictions that took effect in 2012.
Nearly all coal plants in the United States have already met the 2012 requirements by installing new pollution controls, experts said. Many that didn’t make those investments have shuttered.
When coal is burned, it releases mercury into Earth’s atmosphere. Rain and snow can carry the mercury to the ground, where it can settle in waterways and can accumulate in fish and other aquatic organisms. The most common cause of mercury poisoning is eating contaminated fish and shellfish.
Among adults, high levels of exposure to mercury can cause heart disease as well as severe damage to the brain and central nervous system. Among fetuses and babies, it can cause significant developmental delays, leading to lower I.Q. scores and impaired motor skills.
The move appeared to undermine the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary. As the head of the environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, Mr. Kennedy campaigned against mercury pollution for years, citing his own diagnosis of mercury poisoning caused by a diet high in tuna.
“The mercury is coming from those coal-burning power plants,” Mr. Kennedy testified before Congress in 2008. “In 49 states, at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat.”
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Representatives for Mr. Kennedy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Besides mercury, the change would relax limits on other heavy metals released by burning coal, including cadmium, chromium, lead and nickel. These other pollutants are linked to a range of health risks, including cancer, infertility and neurological damage.
“Families will suffer preventable illness simply because Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin want to help the coal industry save a few bucks,” Laurie Williams, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign at the Sierra Club, an environmental group, said in a statement.
Coal industry groups praised the move on Friday, saying the Biden administration’s stricter mercury limits would have made it much more expensive, if not impossible, for many coal plants to continue operating.
The decision “is an important step toward maintaining a reliable and affordable supply of electricity and ensuring coal-based generation can continue supporting the nation’s economy and electric grid,” Michelle Bloodworth, the president of America’s Power, a coal trade organization, said in an email.
President Trump often praises what he calls “beautiful, clean coal.” His administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to prevent aging coal plants from shutting down in the coming years.
Last week, Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to buy more electricity from coal plants to power military installations. And over the past nine months, the Energy Department has ordered units at five coal plants that were headed for retirement to stay open and keep running.
In addition, the E.P.A. has already exempted 71 coal plants from complying with mercury standards for two years. To receive the exemptions, several utilities simply sent an email to the E.P.A. and requested a reprieve, according to emails obtained by the nonprofit group Environmental Defense Fund.
Coal plants are the single largest source of mercury pollution in the United States, accounting for more than 42 percent of total emissions, according to E.P.A. data.
The E.P.A. began regulating mercury from coal plants in 2012 under President Barack Obama. Within five years of taking effect, the restrictions caused mercury emissions from the power sector to drop 86 percent, according to the agency.
“The 2012 standards were a shining beacon of an environmental success story,” said Elsie Sunderland, an environmental toxicologist at Harvard University who has researched the health benefits of reducing mercury pollution.
Yet the 2012 regulation had a “loophole,” Dr. Sunderland said: It imposed less-stringent requirements on plants that burned lignite, an especially polluting form of coal. The Biden administration effectively closed this loophole, she said, by tightening the mercury limits for lignite plants by 70 percent.
Coal Creek Station in North Dakota, which burns lignite, had the highest mercury emissions of any coal plant in the United States in 2025, federal data shows. The owner of the plant, Rainbow Energy Center, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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