The Real Emergency Is Dirty Air and Higher Bills While Polluters Profit

$295 million; 200,000 kids with asthma.That’s the cost of keeping a Michigan coal plant running after it was supposed to close. Now, customers across the Midwest are being forced to pick up the tab—in more ways than one.Last year, the US Department of Energy (DOE) declared an emergency order to force a coal plant in West Olive to remain open past its scheduled closing. In September, a federal court ruled that this move was unlawful. By ordering the plant to stay open past its planned retirement, the Trump administration made Consumers Energy pay $295 million to keep it running—the equivalent of more than $615,000 per day passed on to consumer energy bills.Let’s make sure we all fight for a Michigan where future generations can live, work, learn, pray, and play safely in clean air.

This is a story playing out across the country: Federal decisions are keeping power plants online and putting corporate profits over public health while driving up energy costs. Since May 2025, the Trump DOE has ordered seven fossil-fuel power plants in six states to remain open past their planned retirement.When our government makes decisions about how we get power in our communities, they are also making decisions about whose health and wealth we protect.

Our families should not have to pay the price while corporate polluters and data centers benefit. The Trump administration wants you to believe in fabricated emergencies in order to pay for rising energy costs—costs largely driven by the artificial intelligence data center buildout. But the real emergency is the cost we’re paying with our health, our wallets, and our future—the kind of cost that shows up on our utility bills and in countless doctor appointments, school absences, missed work days, and hospital visits.Power plants are a major source of pollution, releasing dangerous greenhouse emissions and hazardous air pollutants like mercury, soot, and smog.

Air pollution is a public health crisis in the United States that disproportionately affects people of color, and communities of color are more likely to live near power plants, and are most vulnerable to climate impacts. The US saw more deaths from air pollution in 2021 than any other high-income country.That’s why we spend every day fighting for the right to clean air.For decades, we have worked to connect environmental health protection with the values that guide our lives.

Through the Green Door Initiative based in Detroit, statewide Michigan Green Muslims, and with the national Clean Air for the Long Haul coalition, we work with communities to put our values into practice—greening our schools, creating air monitoring and workforce development programs, and helping families understand the real costs and injustices of the energy systems around them.

This work begins with a simple understanding that caring for the environment is inseparable from caring for one another. The air we breathe does not stop at a neighborhood boundary, and pollution does not ask what we believe or what we look like before it enters our lungs. We all share the air around us, and we have a responsibility to protect it.Decisions made in DC can feel removed, but their consequences reach our communities. Three days after the court ruled in Michigan, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the repeal of most of its 2024 carbon standards for power plants and proposed to rescind all remaining regulations that curb power plant pollution.

This is part of a larger effort by the federal government to roll back over 30 clean air and climate protections. Once again, the administration’s polluter-first agenda is prioritizing financial benefits for big business while intentionally ignoring public health harms.Closer to home, DTE, Michigan’s largest utility, has proposed new gas plants as it plans for much higher electricity demand, and watchdogs say data centers are driving that need.

Michigan customers could be left to pay for polluting power plants that leave them with blackouts to feed energy-hungry and water-thirsty data centers instead.We must demand better. Urge the Michigan Public Service Commission to reject new gas plants and retire existing coal plants on schedule. Submit a letter on EPA’s proposal to roll back the power plant standards. Explain who you are, where you live, and why clean air is a human right for you and your family.

Every story makes a difference.Let’s make sure we all fight for a Michigan where future generations can live, work, learn, pray, and play safely in clean air. That’s something worth investing in.