The US Environmental Protection Agency is expected to formally rescind carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Trump administration’s latest major climate rollback is expected to come on the sidelines of a Group of 20 energy ministers’ meeting in Houston, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t yet public. Earlier this year, the EPA rescinded similar climate standards for vehicles and the 2009 endangerment finding, a landmark ruling which held that greenhouse gases threaten human health.
Under Trump, the EPA first proposed revising the power-plant climate rules last summer. This week, the agency is finalizing a piece of the initial proposal — scrapping Biden-era mandates requiring existing and future US fossil fuel-fired power plants to deploy specific emissions-reduction technologies, including carbon capture and storage, to sharply cut their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, according to the people.
Agency officials also plan to propose a separate rule repealing the federal finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically pose a threat, effectively a separate endangerment finding for power plants under the Clean Air Act.
Power plants are the US’s largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions. If the US power sector were a country by itself, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to a New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity analysis of 2022 emissions data.
Under former President Barack Obama, the EPA finalized the Clean Power Plan, which required existing and future fossil-fuel-fired plants to cut their climate pollution for the first time. The Supreme Court struck it down in 2022 and a separate court ruling struck down the first Trump administration’s replacement rule.
The EPA under former President Joe Biden finalized its own rules in 2024, which effectively forced the nation’s current fleet of coal plants to capture most of its carbon emissions by 2039 or close. This is the rule now being repealed.
The EPA didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some utilities and power generators lobbied for the change, arguing the Biden-era standards were unrealistic and not economically achievable. The elimination of the requirements also dovetails with efforts by the Trump administration to keep coal-fired power plants in operation as more energy-hungry data centers and domestic manufacturing come online.
Environmental groups slammed the EPA’s retreat.
“This is a transparent giveaway to fossil fuel polluters, and the courts should see it that way,” said Maggie Coulter, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
Photo: Smoke stack at the Conesville Power Plant in Conesville, Ohio, U.S., on Saturday, April 18, 2020. The 780 megawatt coal-fired power plant is set to close at the end of May, 2020. Photographer: Dane Rhys/Bloomberg
Topics Pollution
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