EPA moves to repeal all greenhouse gas standards for power plants

Environmental groups announce plans to challenge repeal in court

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to repeal every federal greenhouse gas standard for U.S. power plants, eliminating Biden-era rules that would have required existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas-fired plants to significantly reduce their carbon dioxide pollution starting in the 2030s and proposing to rescind all remaining power-sector emissions standards. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the combined action at a Monday press conference in Houston, where the United States is hosting the G20 Energy Summit, calling it the largest deregulatory action in U.S. power-sector history.

Carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of global warming. Power plants are the second-largest source of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, behind transportation.

Zeldin said the actions taken under the Biden and Obama administrations to curtail planet-heating pollution had led to higher energy prices and prevented the country from reaching its full energy potential. “The days of Biden and Obama working to destroy natural gas and coal are over,” Zeldin said.

Large solar and wind projects provide more cost-competitive energy than natural gas and coal projects, according to financial services firm Lazard.

Zeldin said the EPA was also proposing to rescind all remaining greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants. “All of them,” he said. The combined repeal and proposal would eliminate the federal climate framework for the electricity sector that the Biden administration assembled after the Supreme Court restricted the EPA’s options for industry-wide regulation in 2022.

Environmental groups said they will challenge the repeal in court. “These rules are really important, not just for our climate, but also to protect public health from the dangers of local air pollution,” said Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Environmental groups say the move will increase pollutants that harm human health.

Trump has rejected the basic tenets of climate science and has called climate change a “con job.” This is his latest effort to reverse former President Biden’s climate agenda and make it more difficult for future administrations to limit human-caused greenhouse gas pollution heating the planet.

The legal basis for federal power-plant climate rules was laid by the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which concluded that the EPA is required to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The agency followed in 2009 with an endangerment finding that designated greenhouse gas pollution as a threat to human health.

In 2014, the Obama administration proposed the Clean Power Plan, aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030. That plan faced legal challenges and never went into effect, but the country met that goal well before 2030 as coal-fired plants were replaced by natural gas-fired plants that emit less carbon dioxide and renewable energy projects began producing more electricity.

Five years later, Trump replaced the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which allowed power plants to emit more climate pollution. The Biden administration, which took office in 2021 with the most ambitious climate plan of any major-party candidate in U.S. history, set a goal of eliminating climate pollution from the power sector by 2035.

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in again and restricted the EPA’s options for regulating power plant emissions. Justices said that without a specific law, the agency cannot force the entire power generation industry to move away from fossil fuels toward less-polluting energy sources. The Biden EPA responded by writing rules that governed individual power plants rather than the sector as a whole, a structure that the agency and environmental groups believed would survive a court dominated by conservative justices.

The Trump administration is now repealing those individual-plant limits altogether, alongside its proposal to rescind every other greenhouse gas standard for power plants.

The repeal comes at a time when the world needs to be limiting planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, not allowing more emissions, according to Michael Gerrard, law professor at Columbia University and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Last month was the hottest month ever recorded globally, driven by human-caused climate change and a developing El Niño climate pattern. “2026 is shaping up to be the warmest year in recorded history,” Gerrard said, “and we ain’t seen nothing yet.”