The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it will no longer regulate dangerous planet-warming pollution from power plants that burn coal or natural gas.
The nation’s top environmental authority is rolling back the majority of Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to remove “red tape” that drives up energy costs, agency officials said. They simultaneously announced a proposal to rescind all greenhouse gas emissions regulations on the power sector, including those from the Obama era, and prevent future administrations from implementing new ones.
Coal and gas power plants are the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and the leading driver of human-caused climate change globally.
“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.”
But experts say unchecked greenhouse gas emissions from power plants mean more global warming and set back progress on climate change across the U.S. California maintains its own regulations on the sector.
The rollback could result in as much as 5.8 billion metric tons of added carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to Zealan Hoover, a former senior advisor to the EPA administrator during the Biden administration.
While electricity demand is rising, “we do not have to meet that electricity demand by highly polluting coal and gas plants,” Hoover said. “And when we do run coal and gas plants, we have the option to hold them to a high public health standard. This administration is choosing to cut those standards.”
Monday’s rollback will most directly affect people who live near coal plants, which California has already phased out, and people who live near gas plants in states that don’t have their own regulations. California requires utilities to supply 90% zero-carbon electricity by 2035 and 100% by 2045, which would eliminate natural gas in the power sector.
California Air Resources Board spokesperson Lindsay Buckley said the Trump administration’s decision “has no effect on California’s rules and greenhouse gases from the state’s power plants are still regulated under Cap-and-Invest.”The latter regulation is state’s backstop climate trading program that puts a lowering cap on emissions across sector and allows polluting businesses to buy and trade allowances to meet it.
But the state will still be exposed to nationwide impacts in the electricity sector, as well as global climate impacts that know no state borders.
“Some of these coal-fired power plants are some of the biggest carbon polluters in the U.S. if not the world,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the UC Berkeley School of Law’s climate program. “It doesn’t directly affect California’s own state goals for decarbonizing our electricity sector, but removing environmental protections on those plants means that we’re going to be worsening climate change which definitely affects California.”
EPA officials said on a call Monday that the change does not include pollutants that directly harm health such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are regulated separately. They argued that the 2024 rules established by the Biden administration — which set stringent standards for fossil fuel plants — were a “direct attempt to shift America away from affordable energy” in violation of the Clean Air Act.
The Biden administration’s rules would have required some coal plants to make major cuts in their emissions, in some cases by installing carbon-capture technology, changing how they operate or eventually retiring. They would also have required future natural gas plants to meet strict emissions standards, which they could achieve by converting to run on cleaner-burning fuels like hydrogen. EPA officials now say the technology is not available to meet those requirements.
In all, they said the action will save $310 billion for the power sector.
But Hoover said those calculations omit how much the country will save in avoided health care costs that accompany action on climate change. Increased pollution from coal and gas plants will cause hundreds of billions of dollars in negative health impacts from asthma, heart and lung disease and premature deaths, among other outcomes, he said.
“I reject the premise that you have to choose between clean air and abundant energy,” he said. “It’s actually the Trump administration that has been sabotaging affordable clean energy at every turn since taking office — they are intentionally choosing to promote sources of energy that make us sicker, and also in many cases cost more.”
The EPA’s action is part of a series of steps to roll back regulatory protections over the last two years, including dismantling rules on pollution from cars, limits on mercury and other air toxics from power plants, and the federal government’s formal affirmation that climate change is harmful to human health and welfare, known as the endangerment finding.
In that instance as in this one, EPA officials argued that planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions do not qualify as “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act, and thus are not subject to federal regulations. A 2007 Supreme Court case, Massachusetts vs. EPA, determined that they are.
But EPA officials on Monday also pointed to a 2022 Supreme Court case that limited the agency’s authority to use the Clean Air Act to broadly restructure the nation’s electricity system, and said the Biden administration’s rules were “another example of the Democrats’ war on America’s natural resources.”
“Unlike past administrations that prioritized the interests of climate alarmists, President Trump promised to put the American people first and he is delivering,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
The announcement comes as the International Energy Agency recently updated its global projections for coal demand, which it expects to rise by 1.2% in 2026 as conflict in the Middle East pushes up natural gas prices. Its previous projections anticipated a slight decline in global coal demand this year.
In the U.S., coal demand has been on the decline for decades, but it rose about 10% last year. That’s in large part because of energy demand from data centers, which the president has promoted powering with coal, and the Trump administration’s championing of oil and gas development. Trump recently announced a $700-million investment into U.S. coal plants — including a coal export terminal in Oakland, which would be the first such terminal on the West Coast.
At the same time, the White House has struck deals with offshore wind developers to abandon their plans and invest instead in U.S. fossil fuel projects such as liquified natural gas. These actions are part of the administration’s broader agenda to “unleash American energy dominance.”
The EPA’s announcement also comes as international officials warn the world will soon breach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, widely considered a tipping point for the worst effects of climate change including worsening wildfires, heat waves, droughts and floods.
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