Rules aimed at limiting pollution from coal and gas power plants are being scrapped, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced. The agency also said it would take steps to prevent future administrations from regulating power plant emissions. The EPA said that getting rid of the majority of the climate rules from President Joe Biden’s era would save $310bn (£223bn) and reduce energy prices. But environmental groups warned it would come at a huge cost to Americans’ health and the planet.
The EPA’s move is expected to face immediate legal challenges. “The reality is that America produces energy better and cleaner than anywhere else in the world, and our power plants should not be unfairly targeted,” the head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, said on Monday. Fossil fuels, which include coal and natural gas, are by far the largest driver of global climate change, according to the United Nations. The EPA said in a statement that it found the Biden-era rules on power plant emissions had “exceeded the agency’s authority”.
The agency said the regulations required “control technologies that are not adequately demonstrated, effectively forcing plants to retire rather than setting standards they could actually meet”. The EPA is also seeking to get rid of all other greenhouse gas rules for the power sector. The changes, which will undergo public scrutiny, were proposed last year by Zeldin. He said the new rules would “ensure affordable and reliable energy supplies and drive down the costs of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing while boosting our national security”.
The Biden-era regulations called for a major reduction in carbon emissions from power plants, as well as vehicles and industrial facilities. It was estimated that the measures would stop 4,500 premature deaths annually. But the EPA said on Monday: “Any potential public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the US power sector.” Zeldin told reporters that safeguards against “hazardous air pollutants” would remain in place “to safeguard human health”. Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions – an independent environmental organisation – described the move as “a giant step backward”.
“In repealing carbon pollution standards for power plants, EPA has ignored sound science and economics and abdicated its responsibility to protect public health and welfare,” Keohane added. The US is currently the second-biggest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, behind China. And the power sector makes up about a quarter of US emissions, at roughly 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent each year, according to the latest available estimates. That means the US power sector emissions are higher than the total emissions of all but a handful of countries.
US power sector emissions have been generally falling over the past couple of decades, albeit with a slight uptick last year, as coal use has fallen. But Trump has long argued for a resurgence in coal power and has regularly criticised renewables such as wind and solar. The precise consequences of today’s announcement for US emissions – and global climate change – are uncertain. Some researchers question whether coal will ever make the resurgence that Trump hopes for.
They point to the sharp falls in costs of many clean technologies such as solar power over the past decade. In 2022, the EPA lost some of its powers to limit greenhouse gas emissions when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of 19 states and some of the nation’s largest coal companies, which were worried about the economic cost of the policy and argued the agency did not have the authority to limit emissions across whole states. Monday’s announcement is the latest move by President Donald Trump’s administration to walk back policies designed to combat global warming and climate change. In February, the EPA reversed a landmark Obama-era scientific ruling, which held that greenhouse gases were a threat to public health.
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