Grist

A former Navy sailor and union laborer from Local 1298 on Long Island, William “Billy” Bishop jumped at the chance to work on the water again when he learned two years ago about job opportunities on offshore wind construction projects. 

After earning a safety certification from the National Offshore Wind Training Center — a collaboration between Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, the Long Island Federation of Labor, and multinational wind farm developer Orsted — Bishop worked on a wind farm near Rhode Island. Now he’s doing structural inspections and maintenance on Sunrise Wind, which is under construction off the coast of Long Island in New York. 

But the Trump administration’s efforts to crush offshore wind projects, part of its broader assault on clean energy, have created deep uncertainty for training programs like NOWTC and workers like Bishop.   

“I would definitely do this forever, and I’ve looked into it since getting the job. But I see contracts are falling through nonstop now in America,” said Bishop. “This might be the last one for a while.”

In 2021, the Biden administration set a target to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade, starting from almost zero, which jump-started a massive effort to train people for jobs in the industry. That rapid ramp-up would have required an estimated 77,000 workers — to build the wind farms, connect the turbines to the grid, operate and maintain the facilities, manufacture the rugged steel components, and more. 

Instructor Ian Champlin (second from left) demonstrates rescuing an unconscious casualty as part of a safety training at the National Offshore Wind Training Center onJuly 21 in Brentwood, New York.
Annie Grossinger for The Hechinger Report

To that end, several states and energy developers collaborated with universities, unions and community workforce groups on a variety of offshore wind education and training initiatives, including safety certifications for skilled laborers, apprenticeships for turbine technicians, and graduate programs in offshore wind planning and policy.

But since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, an offshore wind industry that seemed primed to explode has been pummeled by legal, administrative, and economic challenges. While the Trump administration has also taken aim at solar and onshore wind, it has the most leverage over projects offshore, where the federal government is the landlord. The onshore wind industry in the United States already dwarfed its offshore cousin and continues to grow, for now, despite federal pushback. But the near-term outlook for offshore wind is bleak, and there could be more lasting consequences if wind developers shy away from investing in a market they perceive as risky. 

When it comes to energy policy, “the pendulum always swings from one president to another,” said Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, an industry research firm based in Washington, D.C. “But now the swings are so dramatic that the pendulum’s going to fall off the clock.”

For now, offshore wind training programs are staying afloat by downsizing, focusing on skills that are also useful for careers outside of offshore wind, or sending graduates to work on the handful of offshore projects already under construction when Trump took office. The leaders of these training initiatives insist that an energy-hungry nation still needs offshore power and that the wind boom isn’t dead, just delayed. 

“We’re not making any decisions right now,” said Roger Clayman, a NOWTC director and the retired executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor. “Offshore wind will be back.” 

Dan Ramos, let, and Pedro Costa practice using the 24-volt emergency rescue kit during training at the National Offshore Wind Training Center.
Annie Grossinger for The Hechinger Report

The domestic offshore wind industry is still in its infancy; the first commercial-scale wind farm, off the Long Island coast, only started delivering power in December 2023. Back then, the industry seemed poised for exponential growth spurred by billions in federal grants, tax credits, loans, and other spending under Biden. Several much larger wind farms were already under construction and dozens more were in the permitting pipeline. 

A March 2024 report by the Department of Energy estimated that the nation would face a massive deficit of qualified wind workers by 2030. “We anticipated not only expanding but that there would be multiple centers,” said Matthew Aracich, another NOWTC director and the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York.

Instead, the wind rush came to a screeching halt on January 20, 2025. One of Trump’s first actions of his second term was to sign the “wind order,” pausing all new leases and permit approvals for both onshore and offshore projects. Later that year, the government issued emergency stop-work orders on the five offshore wind projects under construction, arguing that they raised national security concerns. 

Both the stop-work orders and the wind order were eventually overturned in federal courts. But the Trump administration’s war on offshore wind continued on other fronts. 

The government rolled back renewable energy tax credits, which it labeled “market distorting subsidies for unreliable, foreign controlled energy sources,” and rescinded hundreds of millions in grants earmarked for offshore wind and related projects. Meanwhile, the administration has tried to revoke existing permits for offshore wind and slow-walk permitting reviews for new wind projects. Earlier this year, the administration started paying wind energy developers to abandon their offshore leases. 

Union member Joe Mascio adds his signature to a wall signed by everybody who earns a safety certification at the National Offshore Wind Training Center. Annie Grossinger for The Hechinger Report

The combined effects have dimmed offshore wind’s near-term prospects. There are about 6 gigawatts of offshore wind online or under construction off the U.S. coast — less than a third of what the Biden administration had approved for construction. And no new offshore wind farms have broken ground since he left office. That could leave the programs preparing skilled laborers for offshore construction jobs in the lurch when all existing wind projects are complete.

“I think we’re going to be busy into 2027. How deep into 2027, we don’t know,” said Clayman. That’s when Orsted’s Sunrise Wind off the coast of Long Island is scheduled for completion. (Orsted declined to be interviewed for this story, as did Equinor, another major wind-farm developer in U.S. waters that invested in workforce development.) 

Similar questions are facing other unions that upskilled their members for offshore wind jobs, including the Pile Drivers Local Union 56 in Boston, whose workers needed extra training to handle the massive offshore piles that can weigh about 1,800 tons. The heavy-lift training was supported by the international offshore energy company Deme, and grants from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency. These workers helped build Vineyard Wind 1, completed this March off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island, which was just finished.   

“Right now, our projects are on the tail end,” said John Dunderdale, business manager for the pile drivers’ union. He said the trained workers assisted with projects off the coast of New York, and the union had been approached about sending workers to help build overseas wind farms. 

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With or without new offshore wind projects, there’s plenty of work for pile drivers and other skilled labor on normal building and infrastructure projects. But Dunderdale mourns the missed opportunities, notably the New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind projects, both of which were on the cusp of starting construction when Trump took office but are now on indefinite hold. 

“We should have been on to the next one,” he said. “The jobs were there. The training was there. The money, you know, everything was there.”

Other training programs are trying to adapt to the new realities of offshore wind, too. A half-hour drive from the NOWTC, on the campus of Stony Brook University, about a dozen undergraduates recently gathered in a lab for a lesson on wiring high-voltage direct current, or HVDC. Huddled around docking stations the size of vending machines, they attempted different wiring setups with simulated HVDC, which, because it transmits electricity efficiently over long distances, is often used for energy sources like wind and solar that are far from population centers. 

The class was one of several started in 2024 on State University of New York campuses as part of an effort called the Offshore Wind Training Institute, funded with $20 million from the state and the SUNY system. The class was designed to prepare people specifically for the emerging offshore wind industry. But more recently, it has shifted to focus on a wider range of HVDC applications, such as connecting solar farms to battery storage and integrating regional grids.  

Read Next Trump destroyed offshore wind. The Northeast can’t live without it. Jake Bittle

“Luckily, we have a skill and a discipline that we’re teaching these students that does not entirely rely on offshore wind,” said Derek O’Connor, senior workforce development manager in Stony Brook’s Office for Research and Innovation. 

A similar pivot occurred within “A Taste of the Trades,” a paid summer training program for local high schoolers created two years ago by Stony Brook, Suffolk County Community College, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a company working on the Sunrise Wind project. The program offers hands-on learning for a wide range of jobs in the energy sector, including welding and microgrid development. The first summer, networking events and visits to job sites were designed to introduce students to opportunities in offshore wind, but more recently, students have been exposed to a wider range of electric grid operations and infrastructure jobs.   

The more you look at the variety of skills needed for work in offshore wind, the more you see overlaps with what’s needed in the nation’s energy sector writ large, said O’Connor. “We’ve been flexible and agile in responding to some of the changes, being less focused on the power generation source and more about grid stability and reliability.”

Indeed, despite the political attacks on offshore wind and the diminishing opportunities, the clean energy sector overall faces a big and growing shortage of workers. Wind turbine technicians and solar installers, for example, are among the fastest growing occupations in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“The industry continues to grow, even with the uncertainty that we’re experiencing,” said Abby Huston, vice president of programs for the Clean Power Institute, the nonprofit workforce development arm of the American Clean Power Association, a national advocacy and trade organization. “What we’ve found is there’s a lot more adaptation in terms of how to build workforce programs rather than closing them down, because there’s still such a huge need.”

Other examples: Her group is partnering with schools and community colleges to build awareness of clean energy and its career opportunities broadly; the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has shifted some of its funding focus from offshore wind to a new, broader portfolio in “ocean tech,” such as improving coastal resilience and monitoring the health of marine ecosystems by analyzing traces of DNA in the water; and a Maryland state job training program created in 2022 to bolster the offshore wind industry has placed thousands of people in fields requiring similar skills such as shipbuilding and aerospace. 

Meanwhile, energy industry experts say there are plenty of reasons to believe that offshore wind could eventually make a comeback; the surging demand and cost of energy is putting more pressure on policymakers to tap every available source. 

Back at the NOWTC, workers are still signing up for training, but they are increasingly people renewing their certifications, which last two years, rather than first-timers, according to Clayman. 

This summer, one of those workers renewing their certificates was Bishop. He estimates that he has another year on the Sunrise project before it’s completed. At that point, he’ll likely return to working construction onshore — unless there’s a dramatic shift in offshore wind’s fortunes.    

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Offshore wind job training built for a boom is facing down a bust on Sep 22, 2026.

Beneath the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and the deserts in between, lies a massive energy source — and it isn’t a fossil fuel. The smashing and separating of tectonic plates that produced many of the West’s most dramatic landscapes have also allowed heat from the planet’s core to rise nearly to the surface. Now, an explosion of new geothermal energy companies wants to drill into the Earth and capture that heat for clean electricity. These companies have new technologies to better reach the heat, and a massive new customer base: energy-hungry data centers.

Tech giants seeking to build data centers while meeting their climate goals see geothermal as a promising option because it can produce consistent power around the clock, unlike solar and wind. Meta and Google have signed agreements with geothermal start-ups in New Mexico and Utah, including a deal announced this month in which Google agreed to buy 396 megawatts from Fervo’s soon-to-come-online Cape Station facility in southwest Utah, enough to power around 430,000 households. The federal government also received record per-acre bids from developers seeking to build geothermal on public lands in the Mountain West this year. New geothermal technology borrowed from the oil and gas industry, along with California’s renewable-energy goals, have helped drive the boom, but experts say demand from tech companies is a major factor. 

“A lot of these companies have clean power goals, though they are not firm goals when other factors are on the line,” said Wilson Ricks, who manages the electricity program at the climate-focused nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. “Constant power, the kind that geothermal can provide, is really key to supplying data center growth as cleanly as possible, and specifically for providing an alternative to just building lots of gas turbines.”

These new geothermal projects are located in dry Western states because of their geology, but they face an ironic practical challenge: Most new geothermal technologies need water to produce power. If they’re serving data centers, that water use comes on top of the water that data centers pipe in to prevent their servers from overheating. Meeting Western data centers’ demand with geothermal may require careful planning, given the region’s limited water resources, and innovations to make geothermal wells less thirsty. 

Geothermal’s tech and business boom is all about water. Traditional geothermal power works by punching a well into a super-hot pocket of underground water and bringing that water to the surface, like an artificial hot spring. The water either becomes steam or turns another fluid into steam, which spins a turbine to generate electricity. The water is then sent back into the ground to heat up again.

This method requires the perfect combination of heat and naturally occurring water to function, so it’s limited to a few small areas of the map. Newer, “next-generation” geothermal technologies try to get around this problem by bringing their own water to dry, hot rocks and circulating it. The amount of water developers have to introduce, however, can vary widely depending on the method.

A company called XGS Energy is trying to provide geothermal energy that requires nearly no water to New Mexico, which is currently suffering a decades-long drought. XGS uses “closed loop” technology that cycles water through the Earth in a continuous pipe, transferring the Earth’s heat to that water through a special material it layers onto the pipe, and then heating a secondary fluid that vaporizes and runs a turbine. The system recycles the same water over and over again without losing it to evaporation or seepage. In 2025, Meta agreed to support XGS’s project to produce 150 megawatts of power at a yet unspecified location in New Mexico.

XGS said its water savings are what sets it apart from other geothermal systems, and that its simple design yields benefits in terms of scalability, operating cost, and performance predictability.

“For geothermal to broadly scale across the United States, communities need geothermal systems that actively conserve water,” XGS said in a statement. “This design enables us to develop in more locations across the West, and consistently win competitive contracts.”

A cyclist rides across the dry bed of the Rio Grande River in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in July.
Susan Montoya Bryan / AP

But XGS’s type of water-efficient technology may not be well suited to produce power on the scale of data centers’ power needs, according to Roland Horne, who leads the geothermal program at Stanford University. Closed-loop systems generally produce less power per well, and their wells have shorter lifespans than with other approaches, Horne said. Unless technology improves or tech companies absorb the higher costs, water-free geothermal may struggle to produce large amounts of power economically. 

A more popular approach is “enhanced geothermal,” which uses oil-and-gas-style fracking to circulate water through hot rock, manufacturing the kind of underground reservoir traditional geothermal relies on. Inevitably, this method involves losing some water underground. Enhanced geothermal can use less water than natural gas power, which uses it for cooling and steam generation, but the comparison varies by project.

At Fervo’s Project Red site in Nevada — the first enhanced geothermal project to produce commercial power — operators have reported losing 30 percent of the water they inject underground. Fervo says losses will be much lower at its Cape Station project in Utah, which is contracted to supply power to Google, because of its different design; but even at a 5 percent loss rate, large-scale deployment could consume substantial amounts of water. 

For instance, the software company Oracle recently proposed building up to 2 gigawatts of new renewable energy generation, possibly including geothermal, in New Mexico. (The announcement came in response to criticism over the climate impacts of a gas-powered data center Oracle is constructing that could become one of the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitters.) Rough calculations by Kristie McLin, principal investigator at the government geothermal laboratory Utah FORGE, suggest that supplying those 2 gigawatts entirely with enhanced geothermal could consume 42 million gallons of water per day — about half of Albuquerque’s average daily water demand.

“This is a real problem that the industry absolutely needs to try to figure out,” said McLin. “When it’s additive and all your other water sources are already allocated to other uses, it can be challenging to find the volume of water you need to start up and sustain enhanced geothermal.”

Protesters gather outside the New Mexico Environment Department to voice opposition to the Project Jupiter data center during a demonstration in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 21.
Susan Montoya Bryan / AP

Fervo isn’t using potable water at Cape Station; it uses salty brackish groundwater. But in a landscape where drought has made any water source valuable and potentially hard to find — and amid public outcry over data centers’ own water usage — a reliance on constant available water supplies could add another hurdle to geothermal’s spread. 

Water is one of several uncertainties, including transmission access, geology, and drilling costs, that can scare investors away from geothermal projects. The unusual combination of oil-and-gas-style exploration and electric generation has already made it hard to attract capital in some cases. Data center interest has eased that strain, but not solved it, according to Mike O’Connor, director of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium, a nonprofit research organization. O’Connor is researching new funding mechanisms for geothermal to overcome some of these challenges.

Meanwhile, Utah FORGE researchers, whose facility is located next to Cape Station, are testing ways to reduce water losses, including changing how wells are spaced and how water is injected and recovered.

“Utah FORGE is going to demonstrate these different opportunities to reduce water losses and see what performance looks like long term,” McLin said.

The geothermal industry’s ability to answer these questions doesn’t just matter for data centers. California needs clean firm power like geothermal if it wants to meet its goal of 100 percent clean electricity sources by 2045. California already gets more than half its electricity from renewables like solar and wind, but it needs reliable power that can fill the gaps when those sources and batteries aren’t operating. The state’s utility regulator has required power providers to procure a gigawatt of clean firm power by 2026, prompting a California utility to promise to buy 320 megawatts of geothermal power from Cape Station.

“There was an argument for geothermal power before data centers, and there will be an argument for geothermal power after these data centers are built,” said O’Connor.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A clean energy source is buried under the desert, but it takes water to use it on Sep 22, 2026.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open. 

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel-management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel-management rule. 

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel-management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.” 

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Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

The travel-management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel-management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last. 

Before and after photos of restoration work on the Middle Fork of the Judith River. Courtesy of Montana Trout Unlimited

He said a full repeal of the travel-management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. 

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” 

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Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel-management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel-management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel-management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

Karla Gagby, above, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July Fourth. Gagby cannot hike because of a lung injury.
Gary Friedman / Getty Images

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.” 

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel-management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump wants to open nearly all national forest trails to dirt bikes and ATVs on Sep 22, 2026.

Environmental and public health groups are challenging the Trump administration’s proposal to repeal greenhouse gas standards for power plants — a change that’s likely to increase Georgia’s emissions, according to advocates. In their lawsuit, groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and American Public Health Association argue the proposed change threatens public health and the environment.

“Clean air is a basic human right. Power plant pollution threatens the health of millions of Americans and fuels climate change, worsening extreme heat, poor air quality, and other serious health risks,” said Georges C. Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, in a statement. 

The rule that the Environmental Protection Agency wants to repeal gives coal plants the option to either use technology designed to capture carbon emissions or to close entirely, with a deadline of 2032 to comply. For new natural gas plants, utilities would need to either install carbon capture or simply run the plants less often.

In Georgia, the Biden-era rule, which most experts agree was geared toward phasing out coal, was starting to work. In its 2022 long-term plan, Georgia Power, the state’s largest electricity utility, determined that it was too expensive to keep its coal plants running with carbon capture systems and decided to retire them. When Trump came back into office, though, the company’s calculus changed. According to Maggie Shober of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, utilities have been planning for the repeal of the Biden rule since President Trump was elected to a second term. 

Indeed, more than a year ago, Georgia Power got approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission to put off retiring two coal plants, extending one unit at Plant Scherer and three at Plant Gaston. In 2024, the most recent year for which the Energy Information Administration has published data, Plant Scherer, near Macon, emitted more than 8 million tons of carbon dioxide. Plant Gaston, in Alabama, emitted more than 2 million tons that year.

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When the company did this, Shober said, “technically the regulation would have been still in effect, but everybody understood it was not going to stay in effect. So they could roll back those coal retirements without planning to put carbon capture on them.”

During resource planning hearings in 2025 — the process that resulted in the delay of the coal retirements — Georgia Power officials said that in order to account for the regulatory uncertainty, the company ran nine planning scenarios, three of which included compliance with this rule and six of which did not.

“These scenarios provide a flexible framework for the company to evaluate its options among differing plausible future scenarios, positioning it to make informed resource planning decisions,” said Jeff Grubb, the utility’s director of resource policy and planning.

The planning agreement approved in 2025 called for Georgia Power to pursue compliance with the Biden-era EPA rule for plants Bowen and Scherer and report updates regularly to the commission, including “the Company’s assessment of the current legal status” of the rule.

Currently, Georgia Power is still running several coal plants and, as a result of the rising demand from data centers, is building a lot of new generation from methane gas, also known as natural gas. Without the EPA restrictions, Shober said emissions from those new gas turbines could more than double.

Under the Biden-era EPA rules, the utility would only have been able to run the new gas turbines about 40 percent of a year, producing about 4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to Shober. Running 85 percent of a year, as they’d be allowed to do if the EPA’s proposed changes go through, she estimated the turbines would produce 8.5 million tons.

The EPA’s rule change isn’t final yet. There will still be a public comment period, and several groups have sued to block it. But as we have seen with the Trump administration, the existence of a given rule doesn’t necessarily translate to how utility companies operate. 

Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, did not grant an interview or answer specific questions. Instead, a spokesperson sent a statement saying the company “supports regulatory certainty with a durable framework that leads to reliable and affordable electricity for our customers.” The statement made no mention of the company’s greenhouse gas reduction goal of net zero by 2050.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s repeal of the greenhouse gas rule could double new emissions from Georgia on Sep 21, 2026.