George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” in case you’ve forgotten, was the government agency in his book 1984 whose job was to rewrite reality by suppressing truth and freedom through propaganda and thought control. Not to describe reality, not to analyze it, not to debate it, just to replace it. When the Party declared that two plus two equals five, the “Ministry of Truth” made sure every document, every broadcast, and eventually every mind reflected that arithmetic. The horror of the novel is not that this is attempted. The horror is that it works, at least temporarily.
On February 11, 2026, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, TVA’s executive leadership and newly reconstituted Board of Directors had its own “Ministry of Truth” moment. And the new math they asked us to accept was this: a 70-year-old coal plant that has been struggling with reliability issues, poisoning communities with its toxic coal ash, and fouling the air of our region is, in fact, “affordable, beautiful, and clean.”
These are not my words. These are the words of TVA’s own Chief Financial Officer, Tom Rice, who rose to address the Board and thanked President Trump and his Energy Dominance Council — “without whom,” he said, “we would not be in the position today to recommend continuing to operate over 3,000 megawatts of beautiful, clean coal.”
A senior executive of the nation’s largest public utility, with a proud history of engineering accomplishments, publicly thanked a president for giving him permission to ignore engineering reality. In a sane world, this would be a resignation-worthy moment. In our current world of golden delusion, it got Mr. Rice a unanimous Board vote.
Let’s talk about these “beautiful, clean” coal-fired plants, shall we?
From TVA’s own analysis, published in May 2021, “TVA’s coal plants are operating well beyond their original book life and are among the oldest still in operation in the nation.” Which is why the earlier Board recommended their retirement.
The Kingston Fossil Plant first produced electricity on February 8, 1954. Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House. The Korean War had just ended months before. Elvis Presley had not yet recorded his first album. Kingston is now 72 years old, and TVA has just voted to run it “for as long as we possibly can.”
The Cumberland Fossil Plant came online in 1973 — the younger sibling at a mere 52 years old — and has consistently ranked as one of the largest air polluters in the nation. During Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, equipment failures at Cumberland brought the plant offline completely and triggered TVA’s first rolling blackouts in the region. During Winter Storm Fern just weeks ago, Cumberland failed again. TVA’s own retirement planning documents cited “reliability challenges” at Kingston as a primary justification for closure.
None of that engineering reality of these aging coal plants changed on Wednesday. Only the official language did.
And then there is the Kingston ash spill, the largest industrial spill on American soil in History in Kingston, Tennessee. On December 22, 2008, a dike ruptured and 1.1 billion gallons of toxic coal fly ash slurry poured across 300 acres, into the Emory River and the Clinch River, destroying homes and poisoning waterways that the TVA was established to protect.
More than 50 people hired to clean up the massive spill have since died from illnesses linked to the toxic ash. Their families were promised something better. Jessica Waller-Downs, whose parents both died from ash-related illness, told reporters this week: “It just feels like they lied to us again.”
This is the “beautiful, clean coal” that TVA’s CFO thanked the president for allowing them to keep burning.
Big Brother’s Performative Theater in the East Room
Meanwhile, back at the White House, the ceremony was an even more theatrical delusion. Trump hosted coal executives, agency heads, and hard-hat-wearing miners in the East Room for what can only be described as a coal revival meeting.
He signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to buy power from coal plants through long-term contracts. He announced $75 million in federal funding, money Congress specifically appropriated for carbon capture programs, now being redirected to prop up old coal plants.
In a moment that even exceeded George Orwell’s imaginative writing, Peabody Energy CEO Jim Grech walked up and presented the President of the United States with a trophy. The inscription read: “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.” A trophy. From the coal company. Given to a president who took their campaign contributions and promised to return the favor. The NRDC’s Manish Bapna was succinct: “Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor — and now, he is.”
In Orwell’s novel, the Party’s enforcers didn’t need trophies. The power was reward enough. In our current version, apparently, you get a small golden miner and a declaration that you’ve won the war on physics.
“Ministry of Truth” Directives to EPA
The TVA board vote was not even the most audacious act of reality-warping on Wednesday. That distinction belongs to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which no longer even pretends to protect the environment. On the same day that TVA’s Board voted to declare coal beautiful and clean, the Trump administration formalized the rescission of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, the foundational scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That finding has served for 16 years as the bedrock of federal authority to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act.
Without the Endangerment Finding, the EPA effectively loses the legal basis to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, vehicles, and industrial sources. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the intended move last year with characteristic subtlety: “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” The White House called it “the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
Think about what this means in the context of the TVA vote happening the same morning. TVA’s CFO stood up and thanked the administration for the “change in regulatory outlook.” This “change in regulatory outlook,” when decoded, is: the systematic legal dismantling of the scientific consensus that carbon pollution is dangerous.
The “Ministry of Truth” does not just rewrite language about coal plants. It rewrites the scientific and legal status of atmospheric protection itself. The atmosphere that we all live in, that we breathe every breath in, and that is the source of the climatic stability that all recorded human history has depended on, we are now disrupting.
The Endangerment Finding rescission will immediately face legal challenge and will likely be litigated for years. The science, of course, will not be waiting for the courts to catch up.
Carbon dioxide does not check the federal docket before entering the atmosphere.
Now, here is what is actually true, no matter how many executive orders are signed.
TVA is already well into the construction of the methane gas plants designed to replace Cumberland and Kingston. A billion-dollar combined-cycle methane gas plant at Cumberland is under construction now, scheduled to come online in late 2026. The gas pipeline is being built. The engineering work is done. The costs are already being incurred. The Board’s vote does not stop that construction.
Will TVA run both the old coal plants and the new gas plants simultaneously, carrying redundant capacity that ratepayers will fund? The environmental cost is direct. By TVA’s own accounting, keeping Cumberland and Kingston running will add nearly 4.5 million additional tons of carbon and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions every single year.
Those climate-forcing emissions do not become harmless because the legal mechanism for regulating them has been revoked. The smoke will still rise. The toxic ash will still accumulate. The mercury will still move through the watershed. The words “beautiful and clean” do not travel downwind to magically protect the lungs of people living near these plants.
What Orwell understood, and what makes 1984 still so useful as a diagnostic tool for the moment we are in, is that the “Ministry of Truth’s” power does not rest primarily on guns or prisons. It rests on the systematic dismantling of the institutional capacity to know and understand things.
When you remove the incentives that reward truth-telling, when you fire the people who keep accurate records, when you replace experienced leaders with loyalists cleared to say only what they are told, eventually the organization loses the ability to perceive the gap between declaration and reality.
Trump fired three TVA Board members who were less likely to uphold his party line. The Board then went eight months without a quorum, unable to conduct business, paralyzed, while Trump’s nominees waited for Senate confirmation. When the new majority was finally seated, they acted within days.
The vote was unanimous. There was no discussion. No questions. Not a single Board member asked, on the record, about the reliability failures, the construction costs already committed, or the 4.5 million additional tons of annual emissions.
Political Capture
I have watched TVA for more than 30 years. This is the most stark example of political capture of any administration that I’ve seen in decades as an observer of TVA. Nothing compares to this moment.
Normally, TVA exerts some independence. During Trump’s first term, the utility moved forward with multiple coal plant closures despite presidential pressure, understanding that its statutory mission, “low-cost, reliable power for the Tennessee Valley,” required decisions grounded in science, engineering, environmental stewardship, and economics, not performative political theater. That TVA is clearly gone, at least for now. What replaced it stood up in Hopkinsville and thanked the Energy Dominance Council for the opportunity to call aging, failing, polluting infrastructure “beautiful”.
The Party’s ultimate claim in 1984, delivered by O’Brien to the broken Winston Smith, was this: “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” Not because the evidence supports it. Not because reason demands it. Because power, exercised absolutely enough, can make it so. The difference, the crucial, saving difference is that Orwell’s Oceania is fiction. What is happening now is a corruption of reality.
The combustion chemistry at Kingston and Cumberland does not read executive orders. The 4.5 million additional tons of greenhouse gases will enter the atmosphere regardless of what TVA’s CFO told the Board. The coal ash ponds will continue to age. The citizens downwind will continue to breathe toxins. The families of the Kingston cleanup crew are still waiting for the closure they were promised, and will now wait longer. And the hard-working families will continue to receive their monthly bills that will include excessive costs as directed by the “Ministry of Truth.”
Reality, it turns out, is not subject to delusional unanimous TVA Board votes, nor “Truths” tweeted from the Minister of Truth’s “Truth Social” account. The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy will keep fighting because the only antidote to a “Ministry of Truth” is people who refuse to stop telling it.
