Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held more governorships and state legislative seats than Democrats, along with an advantage in state trifectas—unified control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature.
That advantage has disappeared, clearing the path for more climate and clean energy legislation, according to analysts and advocates.
Democrats swept the vast majority of competitive races at the state level, flipping control of governors’ offices from Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas.
The Environmental Protection Agency late last week announced it would end a 20-plus-year effort to develop methods to monitor air pollution from factory farms, effectively shuttering the agency’s stop-and-start attempts to regulate the potentially pollutant-spewing facilities under the Clean Air Act.
The announcement came just days before the midterm elections and was characterized by the agency as a long-awaited reprieve for farmers, a historically important constituency for Trump and the Republican Party.
When tens of thousands of animals are packed into one place, pollution from their waste is blown from ventilation fans or emanates from giant lagoons of liquid effluent. Livestock facilities emit fine particulate matter, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, all contributing to a toxic mix. Research has shown that emissions from these operations are a major cause of air pollution, causing nearly 12,700 deaths in the United States a year.
Chemical plants and other industrial facilities had been required to curb their toxic emissions. A New York Times investigation shows how they got out of it.
The president temporarily waived clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases. Then his appointees worked to gut the regulations altogether.
Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim.
Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Musk’s giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to use the best available pollution control technology when operating the turbines and ordering penalties up to $124,426 per day per violation. Without such remedies, the turbines risked drastically spiking pollution in already vulnerable neighborhoods housing predominantly Black communities nearby, the NAACP argued.
To block the lawsuit, Trump tried to intervene, arguing that the EPA had the power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits any time the president decides against enforcing the Clean Air Act. According to Trump, it would supposedly “not serve the public interest” if citizens were allowed to seek massive civil penalties to punish polluting AI firms that were trying to get data centers operational as fast as possible to support Trump’s AI Action Plan.
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