Trump's EPA delivers new blow to Biden climate agenda

E&E News

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The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it's revoking limits on power plants' climate pollution — removing the cornerstone of a decadelong strategy to douse one of the nation's largest sources of heat-trapping gases.
The proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency would free thousands of existing and future facilities that burn coal or natural gas from regulations aimed at lowering their output of carbon dioxide pollution. It comes as President Donald Trump has shuttered climate change offices across the government, fired scientists and frozen billions of dollars in funding for renewable energy projects.
EPA's plan to unshackle the power sector — the second-largest source of U.S. climate pollution, behind transportation — collides with the agency's past assertions that the most effective way to slow rising temperatures is by tackling the biggest contributors of greenhouse gases.
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Administrator Lee Zeldin has reversed that argument. His proposed repeal of President Joe Biden's 2024 power plant climate rule asserts that the electricity-generating facilities contribute too little climate pollution globally to warrant being regulated. That's even though the United States is the world's second-largest climate polluter, ranking only behind China. The U.S. power sector releases more carbon emissions than all but five countries.
EPA's new rule said that greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. fossil fuel power plants are not significant because they 'are a small and decreasing part of global emissions; cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available; and because this Administration's priority is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.'
Power plants are responsible for almost a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, or about 2.7 percent of all global climate pollution, according to EPA. The agency argued in its proposed rollback that the facilities' don't contribute 'significantly' to global warming, using language from a legal threshold for regulation in the Clean Air Act.
The assertion promises to ignite court challenges from green groups and Democratic-led states.
'The collision between Republican political imperatives driven by the fossil fuel industry and fact and reality is particularly apparent in this because power plant emissions in the United States are a very significant part of global emissions,' said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). 'So it's just plain false to pretend this isn't a big deal.'
If the courts uphold the EPA rule, which the administration expects to finalize this year, it could free the government from legal requirements to regulate climate emissions from other stationary sources such as refineries and industrial facilities.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin arrives to speak during a policy announcement at the EPA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
The administration also announced it will roll back (Reg. 2060-AW68) a separate Biden-era rule aimed at reducing power plants' releases of toxic mercury into the air (Reg. 2060-AV53), strengthening the original Obama-era standards.
EPA's plan also targets a 2015 rule requiring new coal plants to capture a share of their carbon emissions. The Obama-era standard remained on the books throughout the first Trump administration — largely because no new coal-fired power plants were planned.
The rollback comes as EPA targets the scientific underpinning for its authority to limit climate pollution — not just from power plants, but also the transportation sector, the largest U.S. source of warming gases. Called the endangerment finding, the landmark 2009 conclusion found that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health.
EPA is expected to announce later this year whether it plans to repeal that finding, a step that could allow the Trump administration to stop regulating climate pollution from cars and trucks. Together, those vehicles are responsible for about 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions or around 3.4 percent globally.
To regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, the Clean Air Act requires EPA to determine that such pollution 'causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.'
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In the final days of Trump's first term in January 2021, EPA issued a surprise rule defining the significance threshold at 3 percent of U.S. emissions. Such a level would have maintained regulation over power plants but exempted every other industry, including oil and gas production, oil refining and industrial boilers used in a variety of manufacturing sectors.
The rule was later vacated in court because the Trump administration had issued it as a final rule without going through the required public rulemaking process.
This time, EPA is going even further by effectively saying that no industry in the U.S. contributes 'significantly' to climate change, and thus the agency has no authority to regulate (Reg. 2060-AW55).
Yet the U.S. has contributed one-fifth of the pollution that has driven climate change to date and remains the world's second-largest source of planet-heating gases.
That means greenhouse gases from any U.S. sector intensify warming, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate science professor at Stanford University. The science shows that each increment of warming from those emissions causes a 'multiple, exponential effect' in terms of the impacts to the planet, he said.
That brings severe economic costs. Diffenbaugh's research group found that over a nearly 30-year period, heavier precipitation linked to climate change resulted in 36 percent of U.S. financial losses from flooding, while hotter temperatures caused about 20 percent of insured crop losses. Damages amounted to tens of billions of dollars.
'We can absolutely expect the stresses that we experience from the climate system to accelerate,' he said. 'How much of that we experience really does depend on how much humans emit going forward in the future.'
The agency is also proposing to repeal the Biden administration's power plant climate rule (Reg. 2060-AV09). That regulation effectively required coal-fired power plants planning to operate long-term to install technology to capture most of their carbon emissions — something no coal plant in the U.S. has ever done on that scale. It also required some new gas-fired power plants to eventually install carbon capture systems.
Industry groups have argued that using carbon capture systems as the rule's benchmark technology was impractical and possibly illegal.
During oral arguments over the rule in December, several federal appellate judges questioned whether carbon capture technology was ready for the kind of wide-scale deployment EPA's rule would require — even if the agency expected most power plants would choose to shut down rather than invest significant sums in pollution controls. The court never decided whether Biden's rule was lawful.
The 2024 rule would also have required coal plants that commit to closing by 2039 to reduce emissions by co-firing with gas — a requirement the Trump administration proposed to strike down because it says it violates a Supreme Court prohibition on fuel shifting.
The Biden rule was EPA's third effort to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants.
In 2015, the Obama administration issued the Clean Power Plan, which relied heavily on utilities shifting away from coal and toward natural gas and renewables to reduce climate pollution across the electricity sector. The Supreme Court later ruled that the plan overstepped the agency's authority, which the justices said is limited to addressing pollution from specific sources as opposed to entire industries.
During Trump's first term, EPA issued a rule requiring only minor efficiency upgrades to coal plants. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck that down because EPA had refused to consider other methods of emissions reductions.
Despite EPA spinning its wheels on tackling power plant climate pollution for more than a decade, the sector has reduced its emissions anyway — by about 41 percent from its peak in 2007, according to EPA data.
The decrease was caused by a long-term shift away from coal as market forces and the risk of EPA eventually imposing climate rules pushed the sector to use more natural gas and renewable energy.
Zack Colman, Annie Snider and Josh Siegel contributed to this report.