Washington spent four years writing rules that treated American power plants like a moral stain. This week the Trump EPA tore most of those rules up. Factory floors noticed. So did the people who actually have to keep the lights on.
On Monday in Houston, at a G20 gathering billed as an Energy Abundance Ministerial, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin finalized the repeal of the bulk of Joe Biden’s 2024 greenhouse gas standards for coal and gas plants. The agency puts the savings at $310 billion. It also proposed wiping out every remaining greenhouse gas standard on the power sector. Coal headed to the grid, EPA says, could rise more than tenfold. That is not a tweak. That is an admission that the last administration tried to regulate baseload power out of existence and called it compassion.
National Association of Manufacturers CEO Jay Timmons told Fox News Digital the rollback is a game changer. Manufacturers had said the Biden timeline was unworkable when it was written. The White House heard them and shrugged. Then the plants were supposed to install carbon-capture gear that was not commercially ready, or shut down. Ambition without a working machine is just a press release with a body count in jobs.
“It really sent a signal to manufacturers that the administration was listening to our concerns,” Timmons said.
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed.
The Last Crowd Wrote Fantasy. This Crowd Has to Build.
Biden’s 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards dressed up a fuel-shift as a “standard.” Force 90 percent capture on aging coal units and some new gas plants, pretend the technology is “adequately demonstrated,” and watch operators retire units they cannot lawfully keep running. Zeldin’s EPA says that exceeded the Clean Air Act. Zeldin put it in English. For more than fifteen years, he said, Obama and Biden ran a war on coal to wreck reliable, affordable energy. The job now is to make sure Americans can afford to keep the lights on.
This sits on top of the February strike at the legal root. In the Roosevelt Room, Trump and Zeldin killed the 2009 Endangerment Finding and the vehicle greenhouse gas regime that grew out of it. The administration priced that package at more than $1.3 trillion and more than $2,400 a vehicle. The climate priesthood called the Finding holy writ. Congress never voted it into a blank check. Bureaucrats used it like one anyway.
Nobody serious is arguing for dirty water and soot in the nursery. Timmons said manufacturers want cleaner air and healthier towns. The fight is over whether EPA gets to issue commandments that plants cannot obey, then blame the plants when the grid gets thin and the bill arrives.
Uncertainty Is a Tax. Permitting Is the Collection Agent.
Timmons’s real warning was not about last Monday. It was about the next president. Rules yanked by executive fiat can be slammed back by the next one. Manufacturers plan on a long horizon. Product cycles. Plant steel. Multi-year capital. Pendulum government is a tax they cannot hedge.
The leftover noose is permitting. NAM polling finds 80 percent of manufacturers say the length and complexity of the process harms investment. As many as 87 percent say they would expand operations, hire, or raise pay if the maze got shorter. NAM’s America on Hold work with the Foundation for American Innovation puts the annual cost of those delays north of $7.9 billion. Weighted average approval time sits around ten months, and that is the polite number. Mines and major energy builds still rot for a decade while China pours concrete.
Sen. Kevin Cramer has been saying the quiet part. Beijing builds for war. America waits on a comment period. Sen. Alan Armstrong and House Republicans have been stacking bills to make FERC lead on interstate pipes, stop a single state from vetoing a national line, and put a leash on NEPA reviews that never end because activists discovered the courthouse is cheaper than winning an election.
Timmons wants manufacturers in the room when Congress writes the next statute. Fair request. The people who pour steel and run kilns know the difference between a standard a plant can meet and a sermon typed by a deputy assistant who has never stood a night shift.
Lawfare Is Coming. Build Anyway.
Letitia James already called the repeal catastrophic. Environmental shops will sue before the ink dries. That is the business model. Delay the plant, bleed the company, keep the clerks employed. If courts treat the Clean Air Act as a license to pick fuels, the $310 billion is a rounding error next to the lost years.
Factories do not run on vibes. They run on electrons that show up every hour, at a price a payroll can stand. Repealing a rule that forced premature retirements is the start of adult energy policy. Leaving the permit office as a veto booth for people who hate the project on principle is how a country talks about “reindustrialization” while the groundbreaking stays on a slide deck.
Zeldin cut the noose. Congress still has to cut the knot. Until that happens, manufacturers will cheer the signal and keep one eye on the calendar. They have learned the hard way that Washington can love them in September and regulate them back into a corner the morning after the next election.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
