Most days, when she leaves her house in Fort Bend County, south of Houston, she does so wearing a mask. Donna Thomas, a 63-year-old environmentalist, doesn’t take the precautionary measure because of COVID-19 concerns. Instead, she aims to protect herself from the gray plume of smoke—a “menacing storm cloud,” as she puts it—that sometimes wafts from a coal-fired power plant about fifteen miles southwest of the neighborhood where she’s lived since elementary school. Thomas, who has asthma, says she feels an intense weight on her chest when she spends too much time outside, and she sometimes has to retreat indoors because the air reeks of “trash and sewage.”
As president of the small air-monitoring neighborhood council Fort Bend County Environmental, Thomas has worked for more than ten years in her community to pressure NRG Energy to clean up emissions from its W.A. Parish Generating Station. The largest coal-fired power plant in Texas, the facility sits about 33 miles south of downtown Houston and provides around 15 percent of the Houston area’s power. More than 1.7 million Texans live within twenty miles of the facility.
From 2013 through 2023, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates Parish emitted 426,174 tons of sulfur dioxide and 38,666 tons of nitrogen oxides, chemicals that directly contribute to the formation of fine particulate matter. Studying emissions from coal-burning power stations across the country and Medicare data, researchers at Harvard concluded that fine particulate matter pollution from the plant caused an estimated 3,500 “excess” deaths—ones that would not have happened otherwise—between 1999 and 2020, or 166 a year. Thomas said most locals don’t think twice about the air, however, and are often shocked to learn just how deadly “a little haze” can be. “We’re all affected,” she said. “Some things don’t bother nobody until they pass away.”
At times, Thomas has had a powerful ally in her fight against the Parish facility: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For more than a decade, the federal government has been trying to force the State of Texas, which is home to the eighth-most particulate matter–related deaths in the country, to clean up its top polluters—power plants emitting haze-producing chemicals linked to respiratory disease. And it’s not just air quality that the EPA is hoping to address. Texas leads every other state in production of climate-warming greenhouse gases. Large facilities here released almost 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants in 2023, half of which came from power plants, according to the EPA’s annual Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Louisiana, the second-largest polluter, emitted less than half of that.
At the end of the Obama administration, the EPA tried to mandate that Texas coal-fired power plants install or upgrade “scrubber” technology, a form of pollution control that removes some harmful chemicals, such as sulfur dioxide, from industrial exhaust. It disapproved portions of a state plan to address haze pollution that didn’t include these updated controls. The State of Texas then sued the EPA. State Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that the administration was “misinterpreting [regional haze regulations] and misusing federal agencies to force through a radical agenda.” The case made its way to the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it lingered for more than eight years
As the case stalled in the court, the regional EPA, which is based in Dallas and oversees Texas and four other Southern states, collected “confidential” data from several energy facilities to demonstrate the need for pollution controls. But, in September, ahead of the next scheduled hearing, the agency stunningly said it had lost the data. In a written declaration to the Fifth Circuit on September 3, David Garcia, director of the regional EPA’s air and radiation division, reported, “My staff believe that the CBI [confidential business information] was transferred from its originally submitted media to an external storage device, which EPA is now unable to locate.” The document also said the data “cannot be restored or replicated.”
Without the data, the agency moved to withdraw the proposed regulations, which the court approved on December 17. The unforced error gives state environmental officials and companies such as NRG Energy an opportunity to avoid requirements to make expensive upgrades that they and their political supporters argue are onerous and overly costly. NRG and its political action committee contributed more than $1 million to political candidates since the beginning of 2020, including donations to more than one hundred legislators and $65,000 to Governor Greg Abbott.
Spokespeople at the regional EPA declined to grant an interview or answer questions in writing, citing the ongoing litigation. NRG Energy did not make a representative available to talk, but when asked via email about emissions, the study on excess deaths, and EPA haze regulations, spokesperson Ann Duhon provided a statement. “We have a strict policy of complying with all environmental rules and regulations and are proud of our environmental record,” Duhon wrote, adding that the state needs the Parish facility’s “adequate and reliable generation” to serve growing energy needs. “The W.A. Parish plant is dedicated to meeting the growing energy needs of our customers across Texas and complies with all of the existing and future air permits.”
Thomas was disheartened, but not surprised, by the EPA’s failure to enforce emission controls. She said her faith in the federal government’s ability to rein in polluters has wavered. But she reserves most of her blame for the State of Texas. Under the 1999 federal Regional Haze Rule, Texas is required to regularly submit proposals to the EPA called state implementation plans, or SIPs, demonstrating how the state will make “reasonable progress” in reducing visible pollution in areas near national parks, such as Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains. Two SIPs have been submitted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which is responsible for creating plans to reduce haze.
The TCEQ’s three commissioners are appointed by the governor, who did not respond to a request for an interview. Chairman Jon Niermann, an environmental lawyer, served as assistant attorney general when Abbott held that role and then as chief of the AG office’s environmental protection division before the governor appointed him to the TCEQ in 2015. Bobby Janecka, a onetime legislative staffer for two Republicans in the state House, advised the state’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission before his 2019 appointment to the agency. Catarina R. Gonzales worked for the General Land Office and as a budget and policy adviser for the governor before being appointed to the TCEQ in February.
The regional EPA disapproved portions of the TCEQ’s first implementation plan in 2012, on grounds that the plan wouldn’t adequately reduce power plant emissions. In mid-October, the agency suggested it would only partially approve Texas’s second SIP because, the regulator argued, the proposal does not call for sufficient control of nitrogen dioxide emissions, one of the main contributors to haze formation. Ricky Richter, a spokesperson for the TCEQ, wrote in an email that the agency’s current plan demonstrates “reasonable progress” in cutting back emissions. He declined to grant an interview or answer questions in writing.
Environmentalists disagree with Richter’s characterization of Texas’s plan. Josh Smith, an attorney for the national Sierra Club, said the state is particularly uncooperative with the EPA, noting it regularly sues the agency over cleanup measures that other states adopt. (Indeed, in 2017, days before Donald Trump took office, Ken Paxton joked about suing the agency one final time, and then a day later sued it over a different matter.)
Thomas is just one of many Texans who will continue organizing against unhealthy air. Paulette Goree, a 71-year-old Beckville resident who volunteers with the local child welfare board, says that the towering coal-fired Martin Lake power plant has cast haze over her small town, near the Louisiana border, for decades. She says she’s watched her neighbors suffer through worsening respiratory issues since the facility, the second largest of its kind in Texas, opened, in the late 1970s. The study from the Harvard researchers supports her claims: Researchers concluded that pollution from the Martin Lake plant led to 4,100 excess deaths between 1999 and 2020. Goree now doubts that Texas will hold polluters to account. “Compliance [from power plants] is going to be the key to effective cleanup,” Goree said, “but I don’t think they’re doing that.”
Meranda Cohn, a communications director for the parent company of Luminant, the energy company that runs the Martin Lake plant, wrote in an email that sulfur dioxide emissions from the plant dropped by 75 percent between 2018 and 2023 thanks to scrubber technology of the sort Thomas hopes becomes mandated everywhere. Cohn did not directly answer questions about whether Luminant plans to update Martin Lake’s current scrubbers, as the EPA proposal called for, but she said the area around the plant is “fully meeting” national sulfur dioxide standards.
The EPA has until the end of May to finalize a decision on the TCEQ’s most recent haze-reduction plan. When the Trump administration takes office in January, Smith said he expects the agency to approve the state’s proposal. Last month, Trump nominated former U.S. Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA. Zeldin, a New York Republican, said in a November interview with Fox News that he will roll back regulations on energy companies within the first hundred days of his term.
Given that the governor appoints the three members of the TCEQ, said Thomas, nothing will change unless Texas voters elect a governor who cares more about healthy air than about the interests of power plant owners. “We are making progress, but I don’t have faith in TCEQ as it is,” Thomas said. “We have to consider our state legislators and, more so, our governor. It’s him who’s causing TCEQ to allow energy companies to pollute.”
