EPA scraps climate curbs for US power generation

EPA on Monday landed a major blow against current and future greenhouse gas regulations for power plants, the largest U.S. industrial contributor to climate change.

The Trump administration rescinded marquee Biden-era standards targeting carbon emissions from fossil fuel power generation — and proposed blocking any future power plant carbon regulations.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a G20 minister-level meeting in Houston on “energy abundance” that EPA was walking away from the 2024 standards, which would have required long-serving coal and some new gas plants to eventually capture and store most of their carbon emissions underground.

“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,” Zeldin said in a statement announcing the move.

The repeal came packaged with a new proposal that would scuttle EPA’s legal basis for regulating power plant carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act — an attempt to prevent future administrations from reinstating standards. While certain to be challenged in court, if upheld, the rules will represent a final nail in the coffin for most federal climate regulation.

Monday’s repeal marks the third time an EPA power plant carbon rule has been repealed before it was implemented. The agency has tried for more than a decade to use a catchall part of the Clean Air Act known as Section 111 to tackle U.S. power sector climate emissions, which are second only to climate pollution from motor vehicles.

If the Trump administration gets its way, it will be the last.

“The proposed rule takes the position that it is beyond our authority in the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases for climate change for power plants,” an EPA official told reporters at a Monday afternoon briefing.

It comes as the power sector heightens calls for an end to the regulatory whiplash of the last decade as they struggle to meet demand needs from rapidly scaling data centers. And it represents an escalation of the Trump administration’s policy preference for fossil fuels over renewable energy.

The package released Monday answered urgent power industry pleas to undo a remaining Obama-era regulation that would require new gas-fired power plants to meet stricter efficiency standards. The requirements on certain new coal- and gas-fired units would remain temporarily in place, but if the supplemental proposal on EPA’s regulatory authority becomes final, those rules would be wiped away, too.

Utilities and electric cooperatives have raised concerns about those gas plant standards, though they’ve largely shrugged off the Obama-era coal plant rules.

It has been 13 years since a new coal-fired power plant was built in the U.S., though the Trump administration this summer pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to support new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia tied to new data centers.

EPA’s new “supplemental proposal” would effectively extend to the power sector its February repeal of the endangerment finding, a keystone 2009 science finding that paved the way for EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The official said it advances the same argument — that the Clean Air Act’s “definition of air pollution [applies] to local and regional impacts and not to those that are global in nature.”

The power industry praised the rules, citing increasing demand and rising prices for consumers.

National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson, a former Democratic lawmaker, urged EPA to “work quickly to finish the job.”

“America’s electric grid needs every available electron,” Matheson said.

Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of the coal industry group America’s Power, said the Biden-era coal plant rules would have been catastrophic for U.S. power providers “by forcing the premature retirement of much of the U.S. coal fleet.”

Environmentalists and Biden administration alumni decried the move, which they said came at a time when the dangers of climate change are becoming more apparent and the power sector is reversing a recent market-driven trend toward lower carbon technologies.

In 2025, surging power demand linked to data centers led to an uptick in coal-fired power and climate emissions, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a July report.

Former EPA officials said the rule would lead to further pollution increases. “Today’s decision lets the nation’s biggest industrial polluters off the hook,” said Gina McCarthy, who as EPA administrator under then-President Barack Obama issued the first set of power plant climate rules and as an adviser to then-President Joe Biden oversaw development of those being repealed now. The repeal will mean more pollution in particular in states where coal plants are being retasked to power data centers, argued Zealan Hoover, a former Biden EPA official.

“Instead of ‘Making America Healthy Again,’ Trump is telling the biggest fossil fuel companies that they can make Americans sicker just to add to their bottom lines,” Hoover said.

Environmentalists have already sued EPA over its move in February to scrap the 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, which underpins all Clean Air Act climate regulations. They quickly pledged Monday to challenge the repeal of the 2024 rules and the endangerment finding rescission for power plants, when final.

“We will be seeing them in court,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.