The Gridlock Scare Was Just Hot Air

Every time stronger clean air standards are proposed, industrial polluters claim that protecting our health will stall economic progress, cost jobs, and delay new projects. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the stronger PM2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) in February 2024 – taking effect in May of that year – polluters across the country once again cried foul.   

The NAAQS protects people’s health by setting strong national limits on soot, the fine particles that come from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories, vehicles, and agriculture. Soot slips into our lungs and bloodstream, causing cancer, asthma, heart disease, and thousands of deaths each year. (To see a map of soot and smog pollution in the United States click here.) 

When the new NAAQS was proposed in 2023, the National Association of Manufacturers said stronger air quality standards would “further weaken an already slowing economy.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of polluters, also tried to stop it, claiming that adoption of a stronger standard would place “as much as 30% of all counties in permitting gridlock.” It even forecasted most counties in the country would either fail to meet the standard, or have “limited headroom,” insinuating that no project permits would be issued in some areas. For a detailed breakdown of the Chamber’s bogus claims, check out this explainer. 

The stronger NAAQS that the Chamber of Commerce vilified, and now Trump’s EPA said this month it wants to gut, has been in place for over a year. So we took a look at some recent permitting actions to see if the dire predictions had any merit. They didn’t. Our findings show that large facilities continue to seek and receive approvals and permits for modifications and new construction, proving polluters’ doomsday economic predictions are once again wrong. The new standards for air pollution do not stop permits from issuing, they only require industry keep air pollution at levels that don’t harm public health.    

What The Permits Have to Say

Polluters have continued to submit new applications to build or expand facilities. And states have been granting those applications. Permits issued for new construction under the updated NAAQS: 

• In Clinch County, Georgia, Conner Holdings, LLC, is a wood product manufacturer that plans to install a pelletizing system to further process wood chips and shavings, which would increase their emissions of PM2.5 by over 400 tons per year. The state GRANTED Conner Holdings’ permit on April 15, 2025.  

• In Putnam County, Illinois, Marquis Carbon Capture, LLC, applied for a construction permit to build a carbon capture plant. The additional soot pollution impact of Marquis’s proposed project was judged by the company’s modeling to be just below the level for which the state would have required more extensive air quality impacts modeling. The state GRANTED this permit on June 23, 2025.   

The following are permits with tentative approval, still undergoing public comment at the time of publication:  

• In Lee County, Texas, SL Energy Power Plant I, LLC seeks to construct a natural gas-fired turbine power plant. The state environmental agency has preliminarily recommended issuance of the permit. 

• In Marshall County, Michigan, DTE Marshall and Ford Motor Company submitted their applications to install and operate a combined heat and power plant (DTE) and a lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facility (Ford) at the same location.1 The public comment period is currently open, and Michigan’s environmental agency has indicated they would approve the proposed permit. 

This list is not exhaustive, just some brief examples of permits. Each state has its own permitting websites and offers different visibility to application documents. In describing these permits, we aren’t saying anything about whether or not they may be lawful or legally flawed. The important thing is that the permits and applications described here show that industry has not stopped seeking and receiving approval to construct and operate new facilities. Even with the more health-protective soot pollution standard in effect, the facilities are still granted permits.  

We’ve seen this story before, though. Every time we need stronger air standards that save lives and keep kids out of the hospital, polluters roll out the same old excuse: economic doom. And every time, the evidence proves them wrong. Clean air delivers health and economic prosperity. 

Just two years ago, in a debunking of a National Association of Manufacturers erroneous report, we compared changes in economic and air quality indicators over the previous decade and showed metro areas across the U.S. saw cleaner air and economic growth go hand in hand. That’s because clean air doesn’t hurt GDP, it rises right along with it. 

The fact is that Trump’s EPA could truly clean the air as it claims it wants to do, protect children’s health, and safeguard families’ lungs—without slowing economic growth—by simply upholding the clean air standards communities rely on. Instead, it is siding with corporations like Big Oil and Big Ag, so reckless polluters can cut corners and put profits over people.  

This fall, according to court filings, Trump’s EPA will propose to gut the NAAQS and allow corporations to dump more soot in the air, with a final action expected in February 2026. But Earthjustice and its clients will continue to fight to make sure these life-saving standards remain in place. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.