The Environmental Protection Agency has announced it is scrapping rules aimed at limiting pollution from coal and gas power plants, removing a central part of President Joe Biden’s climate measures and further narrowing federal oversight of power-sector emissions.
Lee Zeldin, who leads the EPA, said the agency would also take steps intended to prevent future administrations from regulating emissions from power plants. The changes were proposed by Zeldin last year.
The EPA said removing the majority of the Biden-era climate rules would save $310bn (£223bn) and reduce energy prices. Those regulations sought major cuts in carbon emissions from power plants, vehicles and industrial facilities.
“The reality is that America produces energy better and cleaner than anywhere else in the world, and our power plants should not be unfairly targeted,” Zeldin said on Monday.
In a statement, the EPA said it had concluded that the Biden-era rules governing power-plant emissions had “exceeded the agency's authority”. It said the regulations required “control technologies that are not adequately demonstrated, effectively forcing plants to retire rather than setting standards they could actually meet”.
The agency did not provide further detail on the technologies it considered insufficiently demonstrated.
The move follows a series of decisions that have reduced the EPA’s role in setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In February, the agency reversed an Obama-era scientific ruling that greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health. That finding had provided an important basis for emissions regulation.
The agency’s authority had already been constrained in 2022, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of 19 states and some of the nation’s largest coal companies. The decision reduced some of the EPA’s powers to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The power sector produces about a quarter of US emissions, according to the latest available estimates. Its annual output stands at roughly 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent. The US is currently the second-biggest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, behind China.
The Biden-era measures had been estimated to prevent 4,500 premature deaths annually. The EPA’s announcement focuses on its assessment of legal authority, the feasibility of compliance technologies and the claimed economic benefits of repeal. It leaves unresolved how the removal of the rules will affect emissions from the coal and gas plants they targeted.
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