Barbara Johnson has been fighting coal pollution for decades in her mostly Black neighborhood of North St. Louis as an organizer with Metropolitan Congregations United – one of many activist groups campaigning for cleaner air in a city that has some of the country’s dirtiest.
Until recently, Johnson had reason to believe things would improve: tougher federal soot standards adopted in 2024 under the Biden administration were scheduled to go into effect in 2027, requiring plants to slash emissions or shut down. That would have forced one of the area’s biggest polluters – Ameren’s Labadie Energy Center power plant – to cut its soot emissions in half to stay in business.
Johnson’s hopes vanished in February, however, when President Donald Trump’s administration scrapped the standards before they took effect as part of broader efforts to ensure the nation’s grid can meet surging demand from data centers. Now she wonders if she’ll ever get to see the changes she’s been fighting for since her youth.
“You take two steps forward and four steps back,” said Johnson, 75. “I am used to that backwards trend but how many generations will it take to make those positive changes stick?”
Trump’s rollbacks in support of AI mark a reversal in U.S. environmental policy and a painful truth for America’s clean air activists: After years pushing coal toward the exits, the rise of power-hungry data centers has nudged the country’s most polluting power source back to the stage.
Trump last year issued an executive order entitled “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry”, opens new tab that said coal-fired power was crucial to meeting the rise in U.S. electricity demand driven by the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers. He has since provided funding to keep old plants running, issued orders to delay plant retirements, and rolled back environmental regulations on mercury and other toxins to free plants from costly upgrades.
“Ensuring affordable baseload power, including coal, is essential for keeping the lights on and heating American homes,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in an emailed statement about the regulatory rollbacks. “EPA is committed to ensuring clean air for all Americans regardless of race, gender, creed, or background.”
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates artificial intelligence and data‑center growth will create 50 gigawatts of new electricity demand by 2030 – a nearly 4% increase over the 1,300 gigawatts produced by all U.S. power plants in 2025.
Reuters interviewed 20 air quality activists and health advocates for this story and found all had identified the AI boom – and the policies supporting it – as the biggest potential threat to U.S. air quality due to its need for power, including from dirty sources like coal.
Over the past decade, the number of U.S. coal plants providing energy to the grid and other industrial operations dropped to about 200 from nearly 400 in 2015, according to EPA data examined by Reuters. But that pace has slowed fast.
In 2025 only four plants producing 2.6 gigawatts were retired, compared with 94 producing 15 gigawatts in 2015, as the DOE issued emergency orders keeping them online, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Read the full article by Valerie Volcovici and Tim McLaughlin / Reuters
