The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce Monday that the United States will stop limiting the greenhouse gases released by coal- and gas-fired power plants, completing the Trump administration's dismantling of the climate policies of the two previous Democratic presidents. The New York Times reported the plan Sunday, citing two people familiar with the proposal who spoke on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public. The repeal itself is only half of what the agency intends to do.
According to the Times, the will argue that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the environment, and that it therefore has no authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act at all. If that argument survives in court, it would not simply end the current rules. It would remove the legal basis on which any future administration could write new ones.
"They are swinging from the fences to try to prevent any administration from regulating one of the largest sources of emission for the United States," Carrie Jenks, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, told the paper. Administrator Lee Zeldin is expected to make the announcement in Houston at a meeting of Group of 20 energy ministers, an event the administration has branded the Energy Abundance Ministerial. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are also expected to appear.
Electricity generation is the second-largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States, behind transportationThe American power sector would rank as the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world, behind China, the United States as a whole, India and Russia, if it were a country. The rules being rescinded were finalised by the Biden administration in 2024 and applied to coal plants already operating and to gas plants that had yet to be built. Compliance would have required coal plants to capture their carbon emissions and store them underground, or gas plants to burn cleaner fuels such as hydrogen.
The coal industry argued the technology was unworkable at the cost, and warned that plants would close rather than retrofit. The Biden administration projected that the rule would deliver $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047, largely by cutting soot and other pollutants alongside carbon. It estimated that in 2035 alone the standards would prevent as many as 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360,000 asthma attacks, 48,000 missed school days and 57,000 lost workdays.
Those figures will not appear in the agency's accounting of what repeal costs. Under Trump, the has stopped estimating the public health benefits of reducing pollution in the cost-benefit analyses required for clean-air rules, and now calculates only what compliance costs businesses. "This is another nail in the coffin for this administration's commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis," Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times.
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