EPA repeals power plant emission limits despite its own cost analysis

EPA says power plant emissions have ‘no material impact’ on climate

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday said it would erase federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas power plants, a rollback the agency’s own published analysis shows will leave retail electricity prices 0.7% higher in 2030, rather than lower. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the move would cut Americans’ electricity bills, but the agency’s regulatory impact analysis projects prices rising through 2030, with power prices not dropping until the mid-2030s and beyond. The rollback follows earlier EPA moves to scrap emission limits for cars and trucks and is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to dismantle the longstanding federal legal authority to address the climate crisis.

The power sector accounts for roughly a quarter of all US greenhouse gas emissions. In announcing the rollback, Zeldin said “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices” and added that “Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices and a more prosperous America.” The EPA said the reversal of Biden-era carbon pollution standards set in 2024 would save $310 billion. The agency did not answer questions about how it derived that figure, when households could expect to see their bills fall, or what the climate impact of the additional carbon dioxide would be.

Meredith Hankins, a leading attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called Zeldin’s electricity-price claim wrong. “He’s really dead wrong,” she said. A recent NRDC analysis found Americans will spend an extra $30 billion a year on electricity by 2035 as a result of Trump administration policies favoring fossil fuels over renewables. “Even when bills go down in the 2030s it is a natural result of coal plants retiring,” Hankins said. “When they retire bills will go down as coal is the most expensive way of producing power in the US – the fall has nothing to do with this new rule.”

The cost of running coal-fired power plants will continue to escalate, the EPA’s analysis finds, with coal delivered for power set to be 27.3% more expensive than otherwise by 2045. “There’s no way to say this will save consumers money because they are propping up the most polluting, expensive forms of energy and removing incentives for the cleanest, cheapest forms of energy,” Hankins said. The EPA said the new rule “will save billions of dollars in compliance costs” for the power sector, though there is no mechanism whereby those savings would be passed on to households. The agency previously found the 2024 pollution standards would provide up to $370 billion in net climate and public health benefits over two decades. Under the Trump revision, the agency has effectively reduced the dollar value of averting a human death to zero.

Critics said the revised rule ignores the public health and economic benefits of reducing fossil-fuel emissions. “This rule has a lot of problems and math is one of the biggest,” said Maggie Coulter, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Trump’s EPA doesn’t bother to count the enormous costs to Americans’ health and livelihoods from increased power plant pollution.” Bryan Hubbell, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future who worked on the cost-benefit analysis for the first clean power plan, said: “The thing that bothers me is that the administration acts like these costs are just to put a burden on the industry. These emissions from transportation and power generation were leading to health effects, especially in vulnerable populations. These regulations are there to address harm and they were doing so. You’ve taken those regulations away. Now, those harms are going to be increased.”

The EPA also asserted at the rule’s unveiling that power-plant emissions themselves do not meaningfully affect the climate. Greenhouse gas emissions “from power plants have no material impact on global climate change,” the agency said. “In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.” Scientists are unequivocal that greenhouse gases are heating the planet, with each fraction of a degree of temperature increase shaping the severity of heatwaves, drought, flooding and other impacts. The US just had its hottest summer on record, and the world recorded its joint-hottest month on record in August. The United Nations has conceded that the internationally agreed 1.5°C warming threshold is set to be breached within the next few years.

“They seem to be using a sort of futility argument, that anything we do is futile because it won’t solve climate change, which is a myopic view and just wrong on the science,” Hankins said. “We know that every ton of pollution matters, the science shows us that emissions go up there and stick around for a long time.” The Trump administration’s scrapping of pollution limits will unleash far more emissions, the EPA’s new analysis says — an extra 406 million metric tons by 2035, more than the annual carbon emissions of the entire United Kingdom. By 2040, plants will spew an extra 533 million tons, comparable to the pollution of Germany. American coal and gas plants would, if they were a country, be the fifth largest emitter in the world.

Green groups, including the NRDC, said they would challenge the reversed regulations in court, extending a decade-long pattern of whiplash between Democratic and Republican administrations over how, or even if, to curb greenhouse gases. “These claims are becoming so nonsensical and not supported by the reality around us that people are starting to wake up,” Hankins said. “Utility bills are going up and people are starting to understand this is linked to the dirty, expensive energy the Trump administration is forcing to stay open. It just doesn’t pass the laugh test.”

Matthew Roling, an expert in climate policy at Northwestern University, said the underlying economics had already moved against coal and gas. “Solar, wind and batteries are now the cheapest sources of new power,” he said. “This is being framed as deregulation, but it’s just a bewildering and tragic subsidy for oil and gas companies that will be paid for by the rest of us in the form of higher energy bills and dirtier air.”