This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
Residents of the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast are bracing for their latest environmental setback: A two-year exemption loosening emissions standards at some petrochemical plants — a move that could pump nearly 5.3 million additional tons of air pollution each year into their neighborhoods.
According to an analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), five petrochemical facilities planning expansions along the coast would be exempt from rules limiting emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gasses and other hazardous emissions. The facilities include two in Texas and three in Louisiana that make products ranging from pesticides to plastic resins.
Advocates say the exemption deals yet another blow from President Donald Trump to the predominantly Black and brown communities located near these facilities, which are already overburdened by pollution.
“Our lives don’t matter,” says Tish Taylor, a community activist and lifelong resident of the corridor in southeast Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley,” where she says residents are routinely subjected to chemical smells and “fog” from the high concentration of polluting facilities. “Nothing that Trump does says that he cares about people. Everything about his actions shows his disdain for poor and Black people specifically, but poor in general.”
Since taking office this year, Trump has made it his mission to dismantle the previous administration’s moves to improve environmental justice and lower greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change.
Among them was the gutting of provisions that allowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take action against emissions from tailpipes, smokestacks and the oil and gas industry. The agency also has seen massive layoffs and a rescission of then-President Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar push for more renewable energy.
Under this latest move, 52 chemical facilities owned by 25 different companies are now exempt from adhering to key air emissions standards outlined in the so-called HON Rule finalized last year under Biden.
CIEL’s analysis includes emissions estimates culled by the Environmental Integrity Project’s Oil and Gas Watch — a database tracking the expansions of fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Floodlight used those estimates to calculate the overall emissions impact of the two-year regulatory pause on the five communities in Texas and Louisiana with planned expansions.
Expanding Gulf plants get compliance delay
The rule is scheduled to take effect in July 2026, requiring additional pollution control equipment and, in some cases, fenceline monitoring. For the exempted facilities, the rule now takes effect in 2028 — and Trump could push it back another two years beyond that, says Steven Feit, a senior attorney and legal and research manager with CIEL.
Five of the companies are planning expansions that would be exempt from the HON Rule for at least two years. They are BASF’s Geismar, Louisiana, plant, which makes various chemicals and petrochemicals; Shell’s chemical plant, also in Geismar; Chevron Phillips’ refinery in Sweeny, Texas; Formosa Plastics’ plant in Point Comfort, Texas; and Westlake Chemical Corporation, in Westlake, Louisiana, which produces vinyl chloride and other chemicals.
“These rollbacks are essentially saying we’re going to keep the status quo, the existing environmental injustice, the existing disproportionate impact — that is going to continue,” Feit says. “And that, as we point out, is going to worsen, because these facilities are growing, expanding, in addition to all the new ones planned.”
The American Chemistry Council, an advocacy group for more than 190 chemical companies, applauded Trump’s action, saying it will play a “critical role” in maintaining and strengthening the country’s chemical manufacturing sector.
”Without relief from these unworkable timelines, the HON rule jeopardizes the production of essential chemistries that are crucial for our national security interests, including public health and economic security, as they are used for countless everyday products and critical industries such as agriculture, healthcare, semiconductor manufacturing, and more,” the council said in a prepared statement.
In its analysis, CIEL noted that the American Chemistry Council spent nearly $31 million in 2024 and 2025 on lobbying. Ten of the companies granted exemptions spent a similar amount in those two years, CIEL found, while their employees donated $3.6 million to various campaigns during the 2024 election cycle.
The HON Rule is expected to cost the industry more than $190 million a year to meet the new requirements.
Trump: Chemical industry is ‘critical infrastructure’
The HON Rule requires more than 200 facilities across the country to monitor their emissions for certain high-risk emissions including ethylene oxide, chloropene, benzene and vinyl chloride — which have been linked to cancer and other health-related problems. The rule also ends loopholes that exempted facilities from the Clean Air Act during startups, shutdowns and plant malfunctions.
When the rule was finalized in 2024, the Biden administration said it would reduce elevated cancer risk by 96% in fenceline communities. Taylor’s father, Robert, was one of the environmental advocates from Louisiana present when the HON Rule was signed by then-EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
“We always want any petrochemical industry to be regulated,” Tish Taylor says. “That’s all we ask: That they be good neighbors, that they not kill us in the process of making billions of dollars and maybe pay some taxes to help us have economic development.”
CIEL argues the Trump administration cited a never-before-used provision of the law to grant the exemptions, allowing the president to suspend hazardous air pollutant regulations if he “determines that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”
In his July proclamation granting the two-year exemptions, Trump characterized petrochemical facilities as “critical infrastructure” vital to safeguarding the country’s supply chains and reducing its dependence on foreign minerals crucial to the nation.
Trump also wrote that the HON Rule “imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations” and that the monitoring and air quality testing being mandated were not “practically available” and could not be implemented “safely or consistently under real-world conditions.”
CIEL expects the exemptions to be legally challenged as were the ones Trump issued a month prior for the coal industry. The coal exemptions are the subject of a lawsuit filed in June by a coalition of environmental groups.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Feit says. “At some point, the short term becomes the long term.”
Fear, confusion grip communities
Jane Patton, the Fossil Economy Campaign manager with CIEL, says environmental advocates were stunned by how quickly the Trump administration handed out the exemptions — with no community notice. She also notes that the list of exempted facilities released by the Trump administration in some cases did not match the names of existing facilities, leading to confusion.
She says CIEL’s initial calls with environmental leaders in fenceline communities were riddled with questions: How do the exemptions affect the lives of people living in fenceline communities? Which facilities are affected?
“How are families supposed to keep their children safe if they don’t know what’s in the air?” Patton says. “Folks are trying to come to us for answers, and we don’t have answers. Like, it’s not even just that we don’t have answers because we haven’t investigated. It’s that there may not be answers to be had right now, and that is very scary and confusing for communities.”
In 2019, Diane Wilson reached a $50 million settlement against Formosa Plastics, one of the exempted companies, in what was called the largest payout in U.S. history for a citizen environmental suit. The petrochemical giant was found liable for illegally dumping toxic waste — including plastic beads and powder — in waterways along Texas’ Gulf Coast. The settlement funds are being used to remediate affected land and water, boost environmental education and research and revitalize the local fishing industry.
As part of that settlement, the company also agreed to eliminate all plastic waste at its Point Comfort plant in Calhoun County, Texas, and pay penalties until discharges from the facility stopped. But since June 2021, Wilson says her organization has documented 859 violations and $34.1 million in fines, which the company is required to pay under a consent decree.
The company plans to expand its Point Comfort plant, which is projected to raise greenhouse gas emissions the most of any of the expansions — equivalent to about 670,000 gas-powered vehicles..
“It’s really outrageous that they can get permits when you have a serial polluter and it’s documented,” says Wilson, leader of the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper. “I have a real problem about them getting all of those exemptions — like they need it easier.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
