The Trump administration is rescinding climate controls on coal and gas-fired power plants, one of its most aggressive moves so far to unwind US environmental regulations.
Under the final rule announced Monday afternoon at the G20 summit for energy ministers in Houston, the Environmental Protection Agency is axing a Biden-era mandate requiring existing and future fossil fuel-fired power plants to dramatically curb their emissions in the coming decades through the use of specific technologies, including carbon capture and storage.
“It is plain and simple: The reality is that America produces energy better and cleaner than anywhere else in the world and power plants should not be unfairly targeted,” said the EPA’s top air regulator Aaron Szabo in a press call on Monday.
The agency estimates the final rule will save $310 billion, he added, which will help utilities pass on savings to customers and avoid shutting down facilities.
The decision will effectively end the federal effort to regulate the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases in the US. If America’s power sector were a country, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter, according to an analysis of 2022 emissions data by New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
“This is very unusual,” said Meredith Hankins, the federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit. “They are just fully repealing standards with no intent to replace them.”
The move comes after the EPA already delayed restrictions on super pollutants used in refrigeration and air conditioning, axed greenhouse gas standards for automobiles and struck down the endangerment finding, a key scientific determination that climate change poses a threat to human health and welfare.
There are multiple pending lawsuits against these other climate rollbacks, and environmental experts anticipate the new power plant rule will likely be challenged immediately in court, too.
Agency officials on Monday also proposed a new rule repealing the federal finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically are dangerous, effectively a separate endangerment finding for power plants under the Clean Air Act.
In its new proposal, the EPA takes the position that regulating climate emissions from power plants is beyond its authority under the Clean Air Act, according to Szabo. “If finalized, it would prevent a future EPA from being able to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for global climate change for power plants,” he said.
Under the Obama administration, the EPA created new standards — the Clean Power Plan — that required existing and future fossil-fuel-fired plants to cut their climate pollution. Industry groups for the power sector and some states sued over the rule and the courts put it on hold before it took effect. Ultimately, the Supreme Court struck it down in 2022.
President Joe Biden’s EPA then finalized rules in 2024 that essentially forced the nation’s current fleet of coal plants to capture most carbon emissions by 2039 or close. They also put strict emissions limits on current and future gas plants. These are the mandates now being repealed.
Various members of the power sector lobbied for the change, claiming the Biden-era standards were unrealistic. The elimination of the mandates comes as the Trump administration is taking unprecedented steps to keep coal-fired power plants online, including ordering some plants not to retire as planned, in response to growing electricity demand from data centers and domestic manufacturing.
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