The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it will roll back emissions limits on coal- and gas-fired power plants — one of the Trump administration’s most significant moves yet to undo the climate policies enacted under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
The change would overturn a 2024 rule requiring power plants to use carbon sequestration equipment to control pollution; it was one of the biggest climate change rules implemented by the Biden administration’s EPA.
The agency also proposed eliminating all other greenhouse gas emissions rules, arguing that under the Clean Air Act, it doesn’t have the authority to regulate those emissions as they pertain to climate change.
In February, the EPA similarly repealed emissions rules for vehicles, which account for the most pollution in the U.S. today. The agency repealed greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles, as well as the legal conclusion that underpins its obligation to regulate such emissions in the first place, known as the endangerment finding. The moves announced Monday would essentially do the same thing for power plants, which are the second-biggest source of U.S. emissions.
If the newly announced rollbacks survive the expected legal challenges, they could prevent future administrations from requiring coal and gas power plants to limit planet-warming pollution.
“It’s part of a thematic effort to roll back air quality standards,” said Charles Driscoll, a professor of environmental systems and engineering at Syracuse University. “Trump has said he doesn’t believe in climate change, so he’s been working hard to try to roll back any sort of carbon control measures that have been implemented previously or might be implemented in the future.”
The announcement came during a meeting of energy ministers about “energy abundance” at the G20 summit in Houston.
The EPA said repealing the 2024 power-plant rule would save industry more than $300 billion in costs and help “unleash” American energy.
“The Trump administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement.
Industry groups cheered the announcement.
“Overturning these examples of EPA overreach will help preserve and strengthen the U.S. coal fleet, protect grid reliability, and shield electricity consumers from higher costs at a time of surging demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing,” Michelle Bloodworth, a spokesperson for America’s Power, a trade organization for the country’s fleet of more than 400 coal-fired power plants, said in a statement.
Environmental groups have already sued the Trump administration to challenge its repeal of the endangerment finding. They promised to sue in response to the changes announced Monday, as well.
“This is full-throated climate denial,” said Patrick Drupp, the climate policy director at the Sierra Club. “It’s going to mean more pollution, more extreme weather, higher electricity bills because we’re going to continue to rely on fossil fuels. ... This is the administration doubling and tripling down on old fossil-fueled coal and gas.”
The Biden administration’s 2024 rule was designed to be phased in over time. It would have required power plants to sequester and store at least 90% of the carbon pollution they produced by 2032.
The administration said at the time that the requirement would benefit the climate and public health in ways that would far outweigh the implementation costs. The administration estimated that in the year 2035 alone, the rule would be responsible for preventing 1,200 premature deaths, 360,000 cases of asthma symptoms and 47,000 lost workdays.
The Trump administration is reversing the policy when the consequences of climate change — intense heat waves and stronger storms, for example — are becoming more obvious.
Extreme heat has baked much of the world this summer. July was the hottest month on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many locations set all-time records. Overall, the three months from June through August were the warmest ever recorded for the contiguous United States.
Last year was the third-hottest in modern history, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, Copernicus data shows.
The litigation over the new EPA policy changes could take years and might not resolve before President Donald Trump leaves office.
“These cases proceed relatively slowly in the courts of appeals,” said Meghan Greenfield, a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block who oversaw the EPA’s Supreme Court docket for rulemaking during the Biden administration. “It’s not clear to me at this point that this repeal, the one that’s being finalized today, will be before the Supreme Court by the end of this administration.”
