EPA repeals most power plant climate rules, adds proposal

The Trump administration on Monday repealed most of the nation’s climate regulations for power plants and proposed eliminating the remainder. The Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule stops short of immediately erasing every climate regulation on the books for the sector, but it comes with a supplemental proposal that, if finalized, would repeal the agency’s authority to regulate power plants’ climate emissions entirely.

EPA Assistant Administrator Aaron Szabo told reporters that new natural gas plants would still need to abide by 2015 standards and 2024 efficiency requirements. Obama-era regulations for new coal power plants also remain in place, though few if any new coal plants are expected to be built in the years ahead.

The supplemental proposal would find that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA the authority to regulate power plants’ planet-warming emissions. In addition to removing the few regulations that remain, Szabo said, the proposal could block future administrations from regulating power plants’ climate emissions.

“Administrations are always free to change their mind and reinterpret statutes based on the best reading and based on the evidence before them,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It certainly just delays action. Every year that we continue to send unregulated carbon up into the atmosphere, that CO2 is sticking around, and it’s going to continue affecting climate change. It’s going to continue making extreme weather disasters worse.”

Hankins added that the standards “require lead time. They need to give utilities time to plan, and they need regulatory certainty to think through ‘OK, what is our electricity mix going to look like 10 years from now, 20 years from now?’ And by delaying action, it’s just pushing those potential timelines back further and further, and it’s making it harder and harder for utilities to plan.”

The proposal is expected to allow for significantly more planet-heating emissions such as carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. A regulatory analysis of the administration’s proposal, which does differ from the final rule, said it would have allowed an estimated 38 million additional metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2028, 50 million additional metric tons in 2030, 123 million in 2035, 54 million in 2040 and 42 million in 2045.

The U.S. power sector is a major driver of planet-warming emissions, responsible for a quarter of total U.S. emissions. A report from New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that if the U.S. power sector were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter, contributing more to climate change than the entirety of nations including Canada, Japan, Brazil and Mexico.

The report also said that the sector’s 2022 emissions alone will contribute to future climate change impacts that are expected to cause about 5,300 additional premature deaths in the U.S. due to heat and wildfire smoke.

“The public health and welfare toll of this deregulation is just going to be staggering,” Jason Schwartz, one of the report’s authors and regulatory policy director at the Institute, told The Hill.

The Biden-era rule now mostly repealed would have required existing coal plants and new gas plants to prevent 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. The Biden administration said its rule would have prevented a total of 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon emissions through 2047.

The change is expected to eventually lower electricity prices, but the changes may not be particularly dramatic. An analysis based on the original proposal found that in 2028 and 2030, the changes could increase average retail electricity prices by 0.7 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively. In 2035, it would cause a 1.4 percent drop in electricity prices, a 0.2 percent drop in 2040 and a 0.7 percent drop in 2045 compared to a baseline where the Biden-era regulation is not repealed.

“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy. The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a written statement. “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices, but this is just the beginning.”

The rule is expected to be a win for the coal sector. The analysis of last year’s proposal said that in 2028, coal production for use in the electric sector could be 6 percent higher than it otherwise would have been, and by 2045, coal production would be 84 percent higher. In 2045, coal used by the power sector would have also been 32 percent more expensive under the proposal than it would have been under the Biden rule.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said in a statement that the Trump rule “has averted what would have been a catastrophic collision of unlawful and unworkable Biden-era technology mandates with surging energy demands.”

“With today’s repeal, well-operating coal plants are no longer faced with the false choice between commercially unavailable and technically infeasible technologies, fuel-switching or closure. The administration’s action corrects the egregious misuse of the Clean Air Act as a political tool to end American coal generation and implements the law as Congress intended,” he added.

Opponents of the administration’s move are expected to sue to try to block it.

“I would expect that the final repeal will be pretty immediately challenged,” said Dena Adler, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

“The EPA has a legal obligation to protect us from climate pollution from power plants,” said Jill Tauber, vice president for climate and energy at Earthjustice, in a written statement. “Earthjustice and our partners will continue to defend climate protections and hold the Trump administration accountable.”

Adler said it could take time before there’s any actual resolution. “It will be interesting to see how the litigation progresses because EPA is simultaneously finalizing a rule that assumes it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, while also proposing it has no authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

“I think we’ll see immediate challenges, but I think we’re not going to necessarily get to the bottom of some of those legal claims until the intermediary question of EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is addressed,” Adler added.