09/15/2026
The EPA Just Declared Power Plant Pollution Harmless. It’s Time to Strip Corporate Rule from Our Democracy.
If you needed a stark reminder of who our federal government actually serves, look no further than Houston this week.
At a high-profile energy conference, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the Environmental Protection Agency is repealing carbon limits on coal and gas-fired power plants. But the agency didn’t stop at simply rolling back regulations. In a legally audacious move, the EPA is arguing in federal filings that carbon emissions from the power sector do not significantly endanger public health or welfare.
By claiming the agency never had the legal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate these emissions in the first place, this administration is attempting to cement a legal precedent. The goal? Ensure no future administration can ever hold power plant operators accountable again.
To justify this, the EPA did something even more insidious: it completely stopped calculating the public health benefits of clean air.
By the EPA’s own 2024 economic modeling, the original carbon standards were set to prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital visits, and 360,000 asthma attacks in 2035 alone—delivering $120 billion in public health value. Today, the EPA's cost-benefit ledgers list only one line item: the money energy corporations save on compliance.
Corporate Profit vs. Human Life
Why is this happening now? Follow the money and the power.
As energy-hungry AI data centers proliferate across the country, fossil fuel utilities are rushing to build dozens of new gas plants. Rather than requiring these multi-billion-dollar corporations to invest in carbon capture or clean transition technology, the regulatory state is stepping aside to protect their profit margins—at the direct expense of frontline communities, breathing children, and global climate stability.
When a public protection agency explicitly redefines its mandate to protect corporate balance sheets while treating thousands of preventable deaths as non-existent, it is no longer functioning as a public institution.
It is functioning as a subsidiary of the industries it was created to regulate.
The Root Cause: Corporate Rights and Money as Speech
We cannot solve this crisis by simply waiting for the next election cycle or fighting a forever-war of defensive lawsuits. The EPA’s surrender to corporate interests is the predictable result of a legal system that has spent decades elevated corporate "rights" above human rights.
When courts grant corporations constitutional protections—treating their spending as "free speech" and their property as immune from effective public oversight—our regulatory agencies become captured. Public health mandates are rewritten by corporate lobbies, and the constitutional duty to promote the general welfare is traded away for corporate growth.
The Solution: Amend the Constitution
This is precisely why Move to Amend is fighting for the We the People Amendment (HJR 54).
We must explicitly amend the U.S. Constitution to state two fundamental truths:
Artificial entities like corporations are not people and do not possess constitutional rights.
Money is not speech, and the public has the right to regulate political spending and corporate influence.
Until we strip corporations of constitutional rights, corporate lawyers will always find a way to argue that protecting your lungs violates a board room's bottom line.
The EPA's abdication of its duty isn't an isolated policy disagreement—it is a symptom of a deeply broken system where corporate power overrides human survival. It's time to tackle the root cause.
Get Involved: Join Move to Amend today, sign the petition for the We the People Amendment, and help us build a democracy where people—not corporations—hold the ultimate power.
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