EPA says power plant emissions have no material impact on climate change.
Smokestacks at Pacificorp’s 1,000MW coal-fired power plant on October 9, 2017 outside Huntington, Utah. Credit: George Frey/Getty Images
On the heels of the hottest summer on record and a United Nations report warning that global temperatures are likely to push climate risks to “increasingly dangerous heights,” the Trump administration overturned most of a Biden-era rule limiting climate pollution from power plants, the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said exceeds its authority under the Clean Air Act by requiring control technologies “that are not adequately demonstrated.” The agency also proposed revoking “all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants,” arguing their emissions “have no material impact on climate change.”
The plan to revoke the Carbon Pollution Standards was initially revealed last spring.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act’s definition of air pollutants includes greenhouse gases, which cause climate change, and that if the EPA concludes that GHGs pose a danger to human health and the environment, it must act to reduce those emissions. The EPA made that “ endangerment finding ” in 2009.
“The Trump administration is now kicking the legs out from under the entire legal framework for regulating climate pollution by arguing that climate pollution does not harm human health or welfare,” said Zealan Hoover, a former senior advisor to the EPA during the Biden administration.
Hoover and other environmental and climate experts have not yet had a chance to review the specific arguments the agency is making to justify its actions.
Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, expects the Trump administration to make a “non-endangerment finding” so they don’t have to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all. “That goes against really well-established science,” Coulter said. “Will this stand up in court? We would argue, definitely not.”
Experts on the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long attempts to deny the reality or consequences of climate change see the same tactics in the Trump administration’s latest actions. President Donald Trump called climate change the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” last year during a speech at the United Nations.
“Who needs Big Oil to deny climate science, undermine science-based decision-making, and endanger people’s lives and livelihoods when the US government will do it for them?” asked Geoffrey Supran, director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami.
“The government can choose to deny reality,” said Ben Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at the University of Oxford, who has highlighted the role of false solutions in delaying action on climate change. “But the real damages from global warming will continue to accumulate, from heat waves and fires to superstorms and floods, and calls for accountability will only increase.”
Since returning to office, Trump has overseen a multi-pronged attack on the legal and regulatory framework to protect public health and the environment from the climate-warming consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.
In February, the EPA overturned the endangerment finding that underpinned its authority to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles, the largest source of climate pollution. The same month, the agency attacked states’ rights to pass stricter climate regulations by using a parliamentary trick to revoke decades-old Clean Air Act waivers that underpinned California’s vehicle emissions standards, though a federal judge has temporarily blocked that move. And now, in going after the Carbon Pollution Standards, the agency aims to remove limits on power plants.
Part one was repealing the endangerment finding, Hoover said. Now that that’s done, they’re working on part two, rolling back different regulations that relied on the endangerment finding, and part three, which would prevent future efforts to regulate climate pollution.
The first Trump administration repealed a bunch of public health regulations, then Trump lost his re-election bid, and the Biden administration reinstated many of them, he said. Now, they are not just repealing them “but burning them to the ground,” in an effort to make it incredibly hard for a future administration to come back in and re-regulate public health pollution, Hoover said. “It’s really quite pernicious.”
EPA spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment about what science they are using to support the claim that greenhouse gas emissions don’t contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.
The climate and health benefits of the Carbon Pollution Standards “substantially outweigh the compliance costs,” Biden’s EPA announced in June 2024. The agency pointed to a regulatory impact analysis that projected reductions of 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, the equivalent of preventing nearly a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector or avoiding the annual emissions of 328 million gas-powered cars.
The entire regulatory framework is based on cost-benefit analyses, Hoover said. But so far, the Trump administration is “heavily discounting, if not completely refusing” to quantify public health benefits in regulations, he said.
In announcing the power plant regulations repeal, Trump’s EPA said only that, by unleashing coal and natural gas, its new rule will save $310 billion, and its proposal to rescind “every remaining greenhouse gas standard for the power sector” would save an additional $370 million in direct compliance costs. It also said the rules would save American families and businesses billions more.
Independent studies, however, have reported that coal power is driving higher utility costs for consumers. And elevated emissions of toxic air contaminants triggered by the repeal would lead to increases in health damages costing up to $476 billion, according to a cost-benefit analysis by the nonprofit group Resources for the Future.
The two largest sources of climate emissions in the United States are the power and transportation sectors, Hoover said. “And with today’s regulatory rollback, the Trump administration has now finished its work to end the climate regulations on both.”
Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover, and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, and Association of Food Journalists.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
