The announcement was timed to splash down amid an energy-focused gathering of the G20 in Houston. The flue-gas stacks of Mill Creek Generating Station are seen from the Valley Village neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, on Feb. 14. | Jon Cherry/Getty Images on Monday landed a major blow against current and future greenhouse gas regulations for power plants, the largest U.S. industrial contributor to climate change. The Trump administration rescinded marquee Biden-era standards targeting carbon emissions from fossil fuel power generation — and proposed blocking any future power plant carbon regulations.
Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a G20 minister-level meeting in Houston on “energy abundance” that was walking away from the 2024 standards, which would have required long-serving coal and some new gas plants to eventually capture and store most of their carbon emissions underground. The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” Zeldin said in a statement announcing the move. The repeal came packaged with a new proposal that would scuttle EPA’s legal basis for regulating power plant carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act — an attempt to prevent future administrations from reinstating standards.
While certain to be challenged in court, if upheld, the rules will represent a final nail in the coffin for most federal climate regulation. Monday’s repeal marks the third time an power plant carbon rule has been repealed before it was implemented. The agency has tried for more than a decade to use a catchall part of the Clean Air Act known as Section 111 to tackle U.S. power sector climate emissions, which are second only to climate pollution from motor vehicles.
If the Trump administration gets its way, it will be the last. It comes as the power sector heightens calls for an end to the regulatory whiplash of the last decade as they struggle to meet demand needs from rapidly scaling data centers. And it represents an escalation of the Trump administration’s policy preference for fossil fuels over renewable energy.
The package released Monday answered urgent power industry pleas to undo a remaining Obama-era regulation that would require new gas-fired power plants to meet stricter efficiency standards. The requirements on certain new coal- and gas-fired units would remain temporarily in place, but if the supplemental proposal on EPA’s regulatory authority becomes final, those rules would be wiped away, too. Utilities and electric cooperatives have raised concerns about those gas plant standards, though they’ve largely shrugged off the Obama-era coal plant rules.
It has been 13 years since a new coal-fired power plant was built in the U.S., though the Trump administration this summer pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to support new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia tied to new data centers. EPA’s new “supplemental proposal” would effectively extend to the power sector its February repeal of the endangerment finding, a keystone 2009 science finding that paved the way for to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The official said it advances the same argument — that the Clean Air Act’s “definition of air pollution [applies] to local and regional impacts and not to those that are global in nature.” The power industry praised the rules, citing increasing demand and rising prices for consumers.
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