Madison, Wisconsin – A year ago, federal environmental regulators told West Virginia officials that their plan to remove sulfur and smog from the skies of the state’s national wilderness areas was not good enough because a dozen coal plants were not analyzing whether they needed better pollution controls.
Six months later, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), now firmly under the control of President Donald Trump, blessed the same plan, saying that technology assessments would not be necessary as long as visibility met projected benchmarks.
Conservationists say the reversal in West Virginia is just one example of the Trump administration clearing the way for states to roll back pollution restrictions that have helped clean the air in beloved national parks and wilderness areas over the past 25 years.
A rule has improved visibility, but Trump’s EPA says it’s too harsh
A federal regulation known as the regional haze rule requires states to develop plans every 10 years to limit emissions and control air pollution in more than 150 national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and tribal reservations in 36 states.
Since the standard came into effect in 1999, more than 90% of parks and natural spaces have seen sulfur and smog emissions decrease by hundreds of thousands of tons annually. According to the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, the average visual range has increased from 90 to 120 miles (145 to 195 kilometers) in some western parks.
But energy producers argue that the regulations have served their purpose and are too costly. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in March 2025 that the agency would seek to repeal 31 landmark environmental rules, including the regional haze rule, to relieve regulatory pressure on the fossil fuel industry.
EPA rolls back state plans
The EPA continues to seek public comment on how to relax the federal rule. Meanwhile, conservationists say, the agency has weakened rules for individual state plans by rejecting state proposals that the agency considers too tough on polluters and giving the go-ahead to weak plans that the Biden administration had rejected.
“They’re blessing states that haven’t done a good enough job, and they’re dramatically turning the tide in states like West Virginia, like California, like Hawaii, like Colorado,” said Ulla Reeves, clean air program director at the National Park Conservation Association. “They are using these rollbacks and these changes to achieve their agenda of allowing polluting facilities to continue operating.”
EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said in a statement that the agency is committed to following the law and cannot approve state plans that do not comply with it.
West Virginia’s turnaround lowers the bar
The EPA signaled the day after Trump’s inauguration, in January 2025, that it would reject West Virginia’s proposal. The agency noted that state officials decided not to ask eight coal-fired power plants to evaluate whether they needed more pollution reduction technology to continue moving toward natural visibility levels in multiple national parks and wilderness areas on the East Coast.
The state asked five plants to conduct an assessment, but only one complied. One plant claimed it was already subject to federal emissions restrictions. The others said they met the visibility parameters.
The EPA changed course six months later and approved the plan, adopting a new policy that states plans are good enough if the state can demonstrate that visibility improvements exceed expectations in national parks and natural spaces affected by its pollution. West Virginia had already done it.
The National Parks Conservation Association, the Sierra Club and the environmental law firm Earthjustice have sued the EPA, alleging that the new policy allowed West Virginia to avoid imposing pollution reductions and threatens air quality in national parks, including Shenandoah, the Great Smoky Mountains and Mammoth Cave, which is already one of the most polluted parks in the country.
Environmentalists warn that the new policy has far-reaching implications. Visibility levels may reach baseline levels thanks to plant closures or fuel switching, but relying solely on those measurements allows plants that continue to pollute to do nothing, says Sierra Club attorney Joshua Smith.
For example, as early as 2024, the Biden-era EPA said it planned to reject California’s plan because state officials did not take into account pollutants other than smog and did not explain why they did not evaluate pollution levels at a number of refineries and airports. Trump’s EPA approved it last summer in part because visibility was meeting benchmarks.
“We consider this (new policy) to be a backhanded way of going overboard,” Smith said.
Both the EPA and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection said they do not comment on pending litigation.
EPA rejects plant closures in Colorado and Hawaii
Trump’s EPA rejected Colorado’s plan this January largely because it would have shut down a coal-fired power plant near Pueblo without the consent of owner Colorado Springs Utilities, according to EPA documents. The agency noted Colorado Springs’ concerns about the shutdown’s effects on the state’s power supply and that forcing the shutdown could be illegal. The state has challenged the denial in federal court in Denver.
“EPA’s action is not based on failure to comply with regional haze requirements or visibility protections, which Colorado continues to comply with,” Michael Ogletree, senior director of state air quality programs, told The Associated Press.
Hawaii’s plan calls for shutting down six boilers at two power plants on the islands of Hawaii and Maui, as well as the option of shutting down several diesel generators on Maui. The EPA has not yet made a final decision, but in February it said it planned to reject those closures, saying that, like in Colorado, the state had not shown they were legal.
Trump’s EPA to states: focus on energy supply
The EPA has also warned that the Trump administration will not support states that push for plant closures to meet regional haze requirements and that states need to consider plant closures or the effects of pollution abatement technology on grid reliability.
“Coal-fired power plants are essential sources of baseload energy needed to address growing energy demand, the rise of American manufacturing, national security interests, and making the United States the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world,” the agency said in rejecting Colorado’s plan. “Ensuring an affordable and reliable energy supply is a top priority of the Trump administration.”
Neither the US Energy Association, a consortium of utilities, engineers and government agencies working to expand access to domestic energy sources, nor the American Coal Council, a group that supports the coal industry, responded to messages seeking comment.
Supporting coal is like “digging a grave”
Jim Schaberl is a former air and water quality officer for Shenandoah National Park, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the West Virginia border.
He said that when he started working at the park in 2008, a haze of yellowish-brown soot from West Virginia coal plants often hung over the park. Now, he said, visibility has improved so much that hikers can spot the Washington Monument 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the east. Trump threatens to undo all that, he said.
This story was translated from English to Spanish with an artificial intelligence tool and was reviewed by an editor before publication.