EPA scraps Biden power-plant carbon rules and proposes dropping the rest

The US Environmental Protection Agency on 14 September repealed most of the 2024 greenhouse-gas standards for coal and gas power plants and proposed wiping out the rest, Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a G20 energy ministerial in Houston.

The final rule, the agency said, will save $310 billion. A companion proposal to rescind remaining power-sector greenhouse-gas requirements would save a further $370 million in direct compliance costs, EPA projected. Zeldin called the package the largest power-sector deregulatory action on record. Aaron Szabo, the agency's top air official, said on a press call that power plants should not be unfairly targeted.

The 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, issued under President Joe Biden, had required existing coal plants to cut nearly all carbon dioxide by 2039 or close, and had pointed new gas plants toward carbon capture. EPA now says those rules exceeded Clean Air Act authority because they demanded control technologies that are not adequately demonstrated and functioned as a retirement order rather than a standard plants could meet. The agency compared them to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court curtailed in 2022.

Alongside the repeal, EPA proposed to withdraw the finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically endanger public health and welfare. That second step, if finalised, is the piece designed to bind future administrations. Without an endangerment finding tied to the sector, the agency argues it lacks a legal hook to set greenhouse-gas standards for plants under the Clean Air Act.

The New York Times reported that EPA also said US power-plant carbon dioxide has no material impact on global climate change and that eliminating all of it tomorrow would have no meaningful climate impact. An analysis cited by Bloomberg, from New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity using 2022 data, ranked the US power sector as the world's sixth-largest emitter if it were counted as a country.

Plants remain subject to limits on mercury, arsenic and other hazardous pollutants, though EPA has already loosened the mercury rule. Environmental groups said they will sue. The BBC reported the agency also wants to make it harder for later administrations to rebuild the standards.

Zeldin announced the repeal in Houston because energy ministers from G20 countries were in the room. The audience was international as much as domestic. US coal and gas units that sell into regional markets will now plan against state rules, grid prices and remaining hazardous-air-pollutant standards, not against a 2039 federal carbon-capture date.

Lawsuits are expected in the District of Columbia Circuit, the usual venue for Clean Air Act fights. Plaintiffs will argue that the 2024 standards were lawful and that dropping a sector endangerment finding contradicts the 2009 finding on greenhouse gases as a class. EPA will argue West Virginia v. EPA already forbade generation-shifting rules dressed up as section 111 standards.

Household bills are the political claim Zeldin is selling. Environmental plaintiffs will answer with health and carbon inventories. Both arguments will be exhibits. The operational fact for plant owners on 15 September is that the 2039 capture-or-close date is off the federal books pending judicial stay fights. Dispatchers do not need to wait for the last brief to change how they think about a coal unit's remaining life.

The announcement completes a multi-year unwind of the Obama and Biden power-plant climate rules. A repeal of a standard can be rewritten by a later EPA. A successful withdrawal of the legal premise is harder to reverse quickly. For the climate docket the effect is a gap: the largest industrial source of US carbon dioxide is, as of this rule, no longer under a federal greenhouse-gas performance standard.