EPA moves to erase greenhouse limits on coal and gas power plants

The Environmental Protection Agency is finishing a repeal of the rules that limit carbon dioxide from coal and gas power plants in the United States. Officials speaking ahead of a formal notice said the package would land as soon as Monday, on the sidelines of a Group of 20 energy ministers' meeting in Houston. Administrator Lee Zeldin has already described the change as a way to cut more than $300 billion in industry costs and to let utilities decide which plants stay open.

The 2024 Biden rule required existing coal plants to capture most of their carbon by 2039 or close, and set technology requirements for new gas plants. The Supreme Court had earlier struck down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in 2022. A separate court had also struck down the first Trump administration's weaker replacement. The Biden EPA then wrote a narrower rule that leaned on carbon capture at the plant rather than a shift of generation across the grid. That is the text now being pulled.

People familiar with the draft said the agency split the work. One final rule would repeal the 2024 standards on the claim that carbon capture cannot be treated as the best system of emission reduction. A second, separate proposal would argue that greenhouse gases from power plants do not trigger a specific endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act. Earlier this year the same EPA rescinded climate standards for vehicles and moved against the 2009 endangerment finding that underpins most federal greenhouse regulation.

Electricity generation is the second-largest source of planet-warming gases in the United States and the largest industrial source. If the repeal survives the lawsuits that state attorneys general and environmental groups have already promised, plants that the administration has been pressing to keep running would have no federal carbon limit. New gas plants now in the interconnection queues would face the same gap.

An Associated Press review last year, drawing on the agency's own earlier assessments, put the public-health value of the targeted rules at about 30,000 avoided deaths and $275 billion a year while they remained in force. Those figures belong to the prior regulatory record. The current EPA is not contesting the chemistry of carbon dioxide in the new package, according to people who have seen the legal theory. It is contesting authority.

That is the point that will travel to the Supreme Court. In 2007 the Court held that the agency may regulate greenhouse gases as air pollution. The present draft treats later rulings on major questions as a reason to read that power back out of the statute for power plants. If the justices accept that reading, a future administration would need a new statute, not a new rule, to put limits back on the stack.

Utilities have already been closing coal units for reasons that have little to do with the 2024 rule: cheap gas, ageing boilers, and state clean-energy laws. The repeal does not restart a closed plant by itself. It does change the math for owners who have been told to keep units available for reliability, and for developers of new gas who would otherwise have had to plan for capture equipment they say is not ready at scale.

Zeldin's public line is that operators should make the choice that is cheapest for ratepayers. Critics in Congress and in statehouses that still run large coal fleets will welcome that sentence. State regulators in California, New York and the Northeast already impose their own carbon prices and plant rules. Those state systems remain. What drops is the national floor.

The timing is not accidental. Houston is hosting energy ministers while oil prices sit above $100 because of the war around Hormuz and the Red Sea. The White House wants a domestic production story to sit next to that shock. Repealing a capture mandate is a faster signal than permitting a new mine or a new reactor.

The immediate next step is publication in the Federal Register and the first complaints in federal court. Plants will not change their dispatch on the day the notice posts. Investors will. Any coal unit that had been marked for capture spend or for closure in the 2030s now has a different spreadsheet, until a judge says otherwise.