The Health Case Against Coal-for-AI Was Disarmed Before It Could Be Made

In August, leaders of the Make America Healthy Again movement wrote to the president asking him not to let AI's hunger for electricity become a reason to burn more coal, warning of mercury, soot, and coal ash and proposing geothermal and solar instead ^[1]. One name was missing from the letter: the movement's own standard-bearer. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary who has spent a year turning "Make America Healthy Again" into federal policy, did not sign it. The absence matters because of what is being built in the meantime. The Environmental Protection Agency has framed rolling back coal wastewater standards as a necessity of the "AI and data center revolution" and its demand for baseload power ^[2]. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stated the administration's target without hedging.

I think as part of the national energy emergency which President Trump has declared we’ve got to keep every plant open. — Doug Burgum

The regional haze rollback marked the first time the agency wrote the AI race directly into a pollution decision ^[3].

Coal-fired power plants are essential sources of baseload power necessary for addressing surging energy demand, increases in American manufacturing, national security interests, and turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

So the buildout is not hidden. What is missing is something else — the removal, one instrument at a time, of the three things that would reveal what the coal costs: the arithmetic, the advocate, and the lawyer. The arithmetic went first. In January the EPA stopped monetizing the health benefits of air pollution rules — the avoided deaths and asthma attacks that used to sit on one side of the ledger when the agency weighed a regulation — while continuing to calculate what compliance costs industry ^[4]. A rule now shows only what it costs companies, never what it saves in lives. The agency then moved to rescind the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal determination that greenhouse gases harm public health, which Administrator Lee Zeldin called "driving a dagger through the heart of climate change religion" ^[5]. The advocate has been steered elsewhere. Kennedy's MAHA strategy — the movement's governing document — covers food dyes, ultra-processed foods, vaccines, and childhood chronic disease. It contains nothing on air pollution, coal, or energy ^[6]. He has spent his capital defending $16 billion in cuts to his own department, including $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health — the agency that would fund the research into what more coal smoke does to the people downwind of it ^[7]. The lawsuits that do exist are partisan — two dozen Democratic-led states sued over the endangerment repeal — not the health movement ^[8]. Asked about his tenure, Kennedy frames it in terms of latitude from the president.

President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The lawyer is being removed last. Greenpeace faces $670 million in damages in a suit brought by pipeline company Energy Transfer, and ExxonMobil has filed defamation suits against the Sierra Club, which fired its executive director ^[9]. In Louisiana, residents near Meta's Hyperion data center have documented brown tap water and dust, but a 2024 state law bars community monitoring data from being used to allege regulatory violations ^[10]. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade's summary of that statute is blunt.

A criminal does not want you to put in crime cameras. And that's exactly what we're seeing from industry in the state of Louisiana. — Louisiana Bucket Brigade

None of these actions, on its own, says "do not count the health damage." Each is a budget line, a strategy paper, a lawsuit, a state statute. Lined up, they point the same direction, and that direction is already measurable: coal plant pollution hit a 25-year high in 2025 ^[11]. The place it lands is concrete, not abstract. In North St. Louis, predominantly Black neighborhoods live beside the Labadie plant, the country's heaviest combined emitter of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides among coal plants; the soot-standard rollback keeps it running another decade to power Amazon data centers, and the people who live there call it a "sacrifice zone" ^[12].