Trump guts climate rules for coal and gas power plants

The Trump administration on Monday gutted regulations that limited planet-warming emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The move allows a sector that makes up a large share of the U.S.’s climate change contributions to release greenhouse gases unchecked by the government. It’s expected to be a win for the fossil fuel industry, while allowing the release of significantly more planet-heating pollution.

When it proposed to kill the regulations entirely last year, the Trump administration estimated that in the year 2035 alone, this would result in the release of 123 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to putting an additional 28.7 million gas-powered cars on the road.

Monday’s move could be slightly different. While it is expected to repeal large swaths of Biden-era power plant regulations, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator Aaron Szabo told reporters that limited pieces of Biden- and Obama-era regs would remain in place.

In addition to Monday’s final rule, the EPA proposed to find that the Clean Air Act does not give it the authority to regulate power plant emissions due to their climate impacts. If finalized, Szabo said that this move could block future administrations from regulating power plants’ climate emissions.

Overall, he said that the moves would allow “American families and businesses experience lower electricity costs … thanks to an increased power supply.”

The moves come as high electricity demand and increasing power prices continue to be a major political issue. Last year’s analysis found that in 2035, axing power plant climate rules could reduce electricity prices by an average of 1.4 percent.

In a press release, the EPA said that it expects its final rule to save $310 billion.

President Trump has falsely said that climate change is a “hoax” on multiple occasions, and his administration has broadly sought to cut back or eliminate climate regulations. It recently repealed all climate rules for cars and trucks , saying their emissions did not pose a threat to the public.

Climate change has been linked to worsening heat waves and extreme weather. 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 such as 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,” said Jason Schwartz, one of the report’s authors and regulatory policy director at the Institute, told The Hill.

Environmental activists recoiled at the Trump administration’s latest rollback before news of it was officially announced.

“It’s really just the Trump EPA putting their head in the sand,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I mean, you can look at the weather we experienced this summer, the heat waves on the Fourth of July. We’re going into an El Niño season with potential hurricanes and even more extreme weather. We see the impacts of climate change all around us every day, and the Trump EPA is trying to say, ‘Well, that’s not our problem.'”

Meanwhile, industry players celebrated the move.

Rachael Marsh, chief legal officer at the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing power companies, said in a statement that it “welcomes EPA’s repeal” of the Biden-era rule.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, which represents the coal industry, 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,” Nolan added.

The EPA’s action repeals most of a Biden-era rule that would have required existing coal plants and new gas plants to prevent 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere.