Trump’s EPA Plans to Ditch Emission Limits on Power Plants

The United States was making solid progress on decarbonizing its energy sector. Time to hit rewind on that. According to a report from the New York Times, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration has drafted a plan that would eliminate all caps on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants.

The proposal, which comes under the leadership of new EPA chief, and longtime climate change skeptic, Lee Zeldin suggests that the emissions generated by power plants from burning fossil fuels “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution”—a statement that seems to imply the existence of good pollution, but that’s a whole other thing.

Per the Times, the agency’s repeal would apply to all greenhouse gas emissions standards that are currently applied to fossil fuel-fired power plants. That would effectively undo much of the work of the Biden administration to clean up the energy sector, including rolling back requirements for coal plants to capture carbon pollution before it leaves its smokestacks and store it, and rules that require gas plants to use newer technologies that produce fewer emissions.

“We are seeking to ensure that the agency follows the rule of law while providing all Americans with access to reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in a statement to the Times.

The US power sector continues to be one of the country’s largest sources of greenhouse gas—second overall, just behind the transportation industry—and is responsible for one-quarter of all carbon emissions. Under the Biden administration’s standards, new power plants were significantly cleaner than the existing infrastructure. According to a report from Cleanview, 96% of new power plants built in 2024 were carbon-free. Per the EPA during the Biden era, its standards required existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution, finding ways to capture or offset the emissions.

Those requirements could go away entirely under Trump, opening up the possibility of more dirty-burning power plants getting built without any efforts to mitigate the potential harm.

Even if the objection of Trump’s EPA is that it doesn’t believe fossil fuel emissions contribute to climate change, there are still plenty of adverse effects of dirty-burning fuels that are real and tangible. A study published in 2023 found that the pollution produced by coal-fired power plants likely resulted in as many as 460,000 excess deaths, the result largely of air-based pollution that is generated by burning coal. So forget the long-term destruction that will result from the planet getting hotter—people are dying because of these plants right now.