The EPA Wants to Roll Back Emissions Controls on Power Plants

The US Environmental Protection Agency moved to roll back emissions standards for power plants, the second-largest source of CO₂ emissions in the country, on Wednesday, claiming that the American power sector does not “contribute significantly” to air pollution.

“The bottom line is that the EPA is trying to get out of the climate change business,” says Ryan Maher, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The announcement comes just days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quietly released record-breaking new figures showing the highest seasonal concentration of CO₂ in recorded history.

In a press conference on Tuesday, flanked by legislators from some of the country’s top fossil-fuel-producing states, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin accused both the Obama and Biden administrations of “seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment.” Zeldin singled out data centers as helping to drive unprecedented demand in the US power sector over the next decade. The EPA, he said, is “taking actions to end the agency’s war on so much of our US domestic energy supply.”

The proposed EPA rollbacks target a suite of rules on the power plant sector put in place last year by the Biden administration. Those regulations mandated that coal- and gas-fired power plants reduce their emissions by 90 percent by the early 2030s, primarily by using carbon capture and storage technology.

Among a swath of justifications for rolling back regulations, the proposed new EPA rule argues that because US power sector emissions accounted for only 3 percent of global emissions in 2022—down from 5.5 percent in 2005—and because coal use from other countries continues to grow, US electricity generation from fossil fuel “does not contribute significantly to globally elevated concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere.” However, electric power generation was responsible for 25 percent of US emissions in 2022, according to the EPA, making it second only to transportation among the dirtiest sectors of the economy. An NYU analysis published earlier this month found that if the US power sector were its own separate country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter in the world.

“This action would be laughable if the stakes weren't so high,” says Meredith Hankins, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The EPA is also targeting the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule, which mandates that power plants maintain controls to reduce the amount of mercury and other toxic air pollutants emitted from their plants. The Biden administration in 2024 strengthened those standards, which date to 2011. Despite progress in reducing mercury emissions since the MATS rule was initially implemented, coal-fired power plants are still the largest source of mercury emissions in the US.

The administration has also made it clear that it intends to try to revive the coal industry, which has been on a steep decline since the rise of cheap natural gas and renewables in the 2010s. In a series of executive orders issued in April intended to boost the industry, President Trump tied the future of AI dominance in the US to extending a lifeline to coal.

Zeldin and lawmakers who spoke on Tuesday praised the original MATS rule, portraying the 2024 update as an overreach by the Biden administration that imposed undue costs on the fossil fuel industry. (“We’re not eliminating MATS,” Zeldin said. “We’re proposing to revise it.”) But the coal industry and red states fought hard against the implementation of the original rule, experts who spoke to WIRED point out.

“They do not want to have increased mercury pollution hung around their neck,” Julie McNamara, an associate director of policy with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says. “Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that affects the most vulnerable. When coal plants finally installed pollution controls, we had massive mercury pollution reductions and incredible benefits associated with that. I think that’s why they want to try and keep the mantle of protecting public health and interest while trying to make it seem like these were just radical amendments.”

The rollbacks are part of a larger attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant and are part of an administration-wide effort to divorce climate science from policy. Earlier this year, Zeldin said that the agency would look to target the endangerment finding, a key determination made by the EPA in 2009 that defined greenhouse gases as dangerous to public health and welfare. That move—outlined in Project 2025—raised public objections even from fossil fuel industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the Edison Electric Institute, which represents utility companies.

Killing the endangerment finding would require clearing a much higher legal bar than rolling back power plant regulations. The proposed rules will be open for public comment, with the agency stating a final rule should be issued by the end of the year; experts who spoke with WIRED say that they expect this latest move to be challenged in court. They all emphasized, however, that the proposal is above and beyond even what the first Trump administration attempted to do in eliminating climate regulations.

“This is a very big deal that the EPA is attempting to sideline itself,” McNamara says. “This is saying, ‘We do not believe that we should regulate carbon emissions from power plants.’ If you can't justify regulating power plants, then you can't justify regulating oil and gas emissions.”

Meanwhile, the planet keeps getting hotter. Figures from Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii released quietly by NOAA last week show that May had a monthly average of 430.2 parts per million, the first time in recorded history that seasonal averages of CO₂ exceeded 430 ppm, and 3.5 ppm higher than last year’s May average. This reading comes on the heels of similarly sobering figures the agency downplayed in April showing the largest-ever jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations between 2023 and 2024.

“Another year, another record,” Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO₂ Program, said in a release about the May numbers. “It’s sad.”