The High Price of Pollution
How Environmental Deregulation Endangers America’s Future
Donald Trump has made it clear: if returned to power, he will push even harder to dismantle environmental regulations, prioritize fossil fuel expansion, and block the growth of clean energy.
It’s a familiar playbook—and it’s one that has already failed spectacularly.
From the deadly collapse of Texas’s energy grid to worsening climate-driven disasters, the evidence is overwhelming: gutting environmental protections doesn’t make America freer or richer. It makes America weaker, more vulnerable, and more expensive to live in.
The Texas Blackout: Deregulation’s Deadly Costs
In February 2021, a brutal winter storm swept across Texas, plunging temperatures below freezing. The state’s uniquely deregulated energy grid collapsed under the pressure:
4.5 million customers lost power.
Hundreds died from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and lack of access to medical care.
Economic losses topped $100 billion.
Why did the grid fail?
Not because of wind turbines, as some politicians falsely claimed, but because natural gas infrastructure and power plants froze.
Texas had been warned about these vulnerabilities after a similar storm in 2011—but chose not to require weatherization, trusting market forces to handle it.
Energy companies had no financial incentive to spend money preparing for rare cold snaps. So they didn’t.
The result was a humanitarian and economic catastrophe—the direct consequence of decades of deregulation and short-term profit chasing.
Environmental Rollbacks Leave Americans Unprepared
Under Trump’s first term, the federal government rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, including:
Cutting requirements for power plant emissions.
Weakening clean water protections.
Slashing fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
These rollbacks didn’t make the economy meaningfully stronger. But they increased air and water pollution and reduced resilience to extreme weather events.
At the same time, climate disasters worsened:
Wildfires torched record acreage in California and Oregon.
Hurricanes intensified, causing massive floods from Louisiana to New York.
Droughts devastated farms across the Midwest.
Ignoring climate risks and weakening protections doesn’t shield Americans from hardship. It amplifies it, leaving communities poorer, sicker, and more dependent on costly disaster aid.
Attacking Renewable Energy Progress
Ironically, even as Trump and other Republican leaders attacked clean energy as “unreliable,” states like Texas quietly became national leaders in wind and solar power.
In 2023, about 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources like wind, solar, and nuclear.
Renewables helped keep the lights on when gas plants failed. They created jobs. They lowered electricity prices.
Yet the Trump movement continues to demonize renewable energy, pushing legislation that would penalize or discourage clean energy projects, while funneling subsidies to fossil fuels.
This isn’t just bad environmental policy. It’s bad economics—and it risks ceding the clean energy race to countries like China and Germany, who are investing aggressively in the industries of the future.
The Dangerous Future Trump Offers
If Trump follows through on his second-term environmental agenda, Americans can expect:
More grid failures in extreme weather.
Higher health costs from pollution.
More taxpayer bailouts for fossil fuel disasters.
Lost jobs and missed economic opportunities in the global clean energy boom.
Environmental deregulation isn’t a path to prosperity. It’s a path to fragility, suffering, and decline.
A truly strong America invests in resilience, innovation, and public health—not in the short-term profits of the fossil fuel lobby.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. The next storm, fire, or flood will not wait for political convenience. The costs are coming—and we can choose to prepare, or to pay dearly.
Up Next
The costs of deregulation are rising — and so is the national debt.
Our next post will reveal how promises to cut “waste and fraud” won’t fix the debt, and could make it even worse.