EPA expected to erase limits on climate pollution from power plants
By MAXINE JOSELOW and LISA FRIEDMAN
The Trump administration plan to announce Monday that the United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, according to two people familiar with the proposal.
The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency would complete the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, was expected to announce the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe the proposal before it is made public.
Representatives for the EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday evening.
Environmentalists and energy experts have opposed the move, which has been in the works since last spring. They have noted that if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.
“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The EPA, he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”
President Donald Trump has derided climate change as a “hoax,” and in his second term, the EPA has systematically dismantled policies aimed at slowing global warming that have been criticized as costly by oil, gas and coal companies. The administration has tried to make it easier and cheaper to produce and use fossil fuels, especially to generate electricity that can meet growing demand from artificial intelligence data centers.
Earlier this year, the EPA eliminated greenhouse gas standards for car tailpipes and eased restrictions on planet-warming chemicals used in air conditioners and refrigerators. Most consequentially, the agency repealed the scientific determination that gave it the legal authority to create climate regulations in the first place.
Under the plan expected Monday, power plants would still be subject to some limits on mercury, arsenic and other contaminants, though the EPA has already loosened restrictions on how much mercury they can emit.
The agency planned to argue Monday that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the environment, and therefore it lacks the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act, according to the people familiar with the matter. If courts uphold this argument, it could prevent future administrations from restoring the restrictions.
“They are swinging for the fences to try to prevent any administration from regulating one of the largest sources of emission for the United States,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.
The Biden administration’s climate rules for power plants, finalized in 2024, applied to coal-burning plants that were in operation and gas-burning plants that could be built in the future. To comply, coal plants could have installed technology to trap carbon emissions before they are released into the air and store them deep underground. Gas plants could have operated on cleaner fuels such as hydrogen, which produces no planet-warming emissions when burned.
The Biden administration estimated that the regulation would also prevent other pollutants, such as soot, from escaping into the air, resulting in $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047. It projected that in 2035 alone, the rule would prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360,000 asthma attacks, 48,000 school absence days and 57,000 lost workdays.
Under the Trump administration, the EPA has stopped estimating the public health benefits of reducing pollution in the cost-benefit analyses necessary for clean-air regulations. Instead, the agency has estimated only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules.
The coal industry had complained that Biden-era restrictions on emissions were costly and unworkable. It had predicted that many coal plants would have closed instead of spending billions of dollars on new pollution controls.
Democratic-led states and environmental groups have said they intend to challenge the EPA’s plan in court. Legal experts have called the plan vulnerable.
Courts have wrestled with the EPA’s authority to regulate climate pollution from the power sector for more than a decade. The Supreme Court in 2016 blocked the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature effort to curb carbon emissions from coal plants.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could limit these emissions but could not force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal. Instead, it allowed the agency to pursue only narrower policies that dictated the operations of individual power plants.
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