In allowing US power plants to emit any amount of planet-heating pollution they wish to, the Trump administration made two striking claims – that this will cut Americans’ electricity bills and that the pollution itself doesn’t really matter anyway. Both claims struggle to stand up to even basic scrutiny. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would erase any limits on emissions from coal and gas plants that are dangerously heating up our planet.
This move, which follows a similar dismantling of pollution limits from cars ands trucks, is part of a broader push to eliminate the longstanding legal authority of this, or any future, US administration to deal with the climate crisis. In justifying this rollback for a sector that’s responsible for a quarter of all US greenhouse gas emissions, Lee Zeldin, the administrator, vowed that “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices”. He added: “Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices and a more prosperous America.” Yet the EPA’s own analysis, published with the new rule, outlines a very different picture.
Retail electricity prices will actually be 0.7% higher in 2030, rather than lower, as a result of the administration’s rule change, it shows. Power prices won’t drop until the mid 2030s and beyond, the document states. The cost of running coal-fired power plants – the dirtiest of fossil fuels, which has been propped up by taxpayer funding and emergency non-closure orders by the administration – will continue to escalate, the analysis finds, with coal delivered for power set to be 27.3% more expensive than otherwise by 2045.
A recent NRDC analysis found people in the US will spend an extra $30bn a year on electricity by 2035 due to Trump’s policies, which has heavily favoured fossil fuels over renewables. The has said the reversal of Joe Biden-era carbon pollution standards, set in 2024, will save $310bn. The agency did not answer questions as to how it derived this number, nor when households can expect to see their bills fall, nor what the impact will be of the extra planet-heating carbon dioxide will be.
The agency has said that the new rule “will save billions of dollars in compliance costs” for the power sector, although there is no mechanism whereby these savings are passed on to households. Critics argue the revised rule also completely ignores the public health and economic benefits of reducing fossil fuel emissions, resulting in a skewed outcome that only highlights the regulatory costs faced by power plant operators. The previously found the 2024 pollution standards would provide up to $370bn in net climate and public health benefits over two decades but under Trump the agency has essentially reduced the dollar value of averting a human death to zero.
You’ve taken those regulations away. Now, those harms are going to be increased.” Yet the made an even more startling claim at the unveiling of the demolished standards by stating that the resulting pollution doesn’t make much difference to the climate crisis anyway. Greenhouse gas emissions “from power plants have no material impact on global climate change”, the agency said.
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