EPA Power Plant Rollback: $120B in Health Damage — SkimNews
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- EPA plans to announce a Monday policy eliminating greenhouse gas limits on coal and gas power plants, per a New York Times report citing two people familiar with the proposal.
- The rollback would erase $120 billion in public health benefits over two decades that were set by Obama- and Biden-era limits, and cause thousands of premature deaths, hundreds of ER visits, hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, and tens of thousands of missed school and work days annually.
- Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests over his political career and argues greenhouse gases are not harmful, despite the Clean Air Act requiring the agency to regulate them.
- Earlier this year, the EPA stopped calculating human health impacts of its own policy changes, effectively eliminating the metric it would need to acknowledge the damage from this rollback.
- The move fits a wider Republican energy push: a separate fuel-efficiency rollback is projected by the administration itself to add $1.4 trillion in costs and raise gas prices by $0.76 per gallon.
- New coal plants are not being built because the fuel is "dirty and expensive," but the rollback could accelerate gas plant construction to power rapidly expanding data centers already driving up electricity bills.
Why it matters: Americans already absorbing higher costs from Trump-era rollbacks would lose an additional $120 billion in projected health benefits over two decades. Because the Clean Air Act explicitly requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the policy is a near-certain target for legal challenges—and Zeldin's documented fossil fuel funding reinforces that the reversal is political, not technical.
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