EPA Moves to Erase Federal Power-Plant Climate Rules

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized the repeal of the Biden administration’s 2024 carbon standards for the power sector and proposed withdrawing its foundational authority to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the regulatory rollback at the G20 energy ministerial in Houston. The finalized standards had been issued under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act and would have required existing coal-fired plants and newly built natural gas facilities to eliminate nearly all of their carbon dioxide emissions or use carbon-capture technology to trap 90% of their pollution by 2032.

The administration is also seeking to formally rescind the agency’s authority to police planet-warming emissions. Its legal position is that the Clean Air Act of 1970 and subsequent amendments do not explicitly mention global climate change and therefore do not grant the executive branch the power to regulate it.

“We are cutting the red tape to deliver the largest power sector deregulatory action ever,” Zeldin said. “But we aren’t just stopping with the Biden administration’s overreach. We also are proposing to rescind all remaining greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants—all of them.”

The move comes as the U.S. electrical grid confronts its most significant demand surge in decades. Artificial intelligence and massive data centers are driving the rapid increase in electricity needs, while power companies scramble to secure electricity for power-hungry hyperscale data centers.

Energy experts say the regulatory relief could prolong the lifespan of aging coal and natural gas units that would otherwise have faced closure under the Biden rules. At the same time, efforts in Congress to pass permitting reform and accelerate construction of new transmission lines and power projects have stalled.

“It’s a Band-Aid for a lot of these data centers to figure out how to get replacement or complementary power,” said Dan Romito, managing director at Opportune, a consulting firm overseeing sustainability. “We need a little bit of a stopgap here. It’s not an ideal choice. But coal can fill that bill for three, four, maybe five years. And that will allow the market to efficiently incorporate geothermal and nuclear solutions into the mix.”

Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar continue to expand, but utility operators are also looking toward next-generation baseload power, including small modular nuclear reactors and deep geothermal systems. Those technologies remain years away from commercial deployment at scale.

Romito called the rollback a “step back in order to take two steps forward.” He said, “This power is not going to magically come out of nowhere. You’re going to have to keep coal-fired power plants and gas-fired power plants online longer, not necessarily to fulfill the anticipated demand, but to meet what demand is currently today. And you just can’t throw affordability and reliability out the window.”

The policy shift is intended to give tech giants and energy developers the regulatory certainty needed to finance and build new, highly efficient natural gas plants. Proponents say those facilities, while still emitting carbon, are vastly cleaner than the decades-old coal plants they will eventually replace.

“Will more data centers be using coal? That’s not something the EPA is going to dictate,” Zeldin said. “What we are going to make sure is that we’re following the law, that we are empowering that choice, and that we’re making sure the smartest decisions are made to unleash energy dominance in this country in every form.”

The legal reversal directly targets the legacy of the 2007 Supreme Court ruling Massachusetts v. EPA. The court held that greenhouse gases fit the Clean Air Act’s broad definition of air pollutants, obligating the agency to determine whether those gases imperiled public health.

That determination was completed in 2009 under the Obama administration through the landmark “Endangerment Finding.” The finding became the legal cornerstone for a generation of climate policies, including federal tailpipe emission standards for motor vehicles, which have also been repealed.

Earlier this year, the Trump EPA took the unprecedented step of overturning the 2009 finding. The administration says previous administrations engaged in “climate radicalism” that harmed American businesses and jeopardized grid reliability. “If you have a problem with the law, change the law,” Zeldin said.

Environmental organizations and public health advocates have condemned the actions. Fossil-fuel-fired power plants are the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for roughly 25% of the nation’s total climate pollution. The transportation sector is the largest source.

Critics say allowing fossil-fuel facilities to run indefinitely without carbon controls will worsen global warming and increase localized air pollution, leading to thousands of premature deaths and billions of dollars in healthcare expenditures.

The announcement followed a series of severe weather events. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently reported that the 2026 summer was the warmest in U.S. history, approximately 3 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average.

The EPA’s assertion on Monday that “emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change” drew sharp condemnation from environmental groups, which called the claim a dangerous falsehood.

“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

The regulatory retreat is expected to trigger a protracted wave of litigation from environmental coalitions and Democratic-led states. The lawsuits will create another high-stakes battle over the executive branch’s authority to address climate change without explicit legislative mandates from Congress.