EPA Power Plant Rollback to Cost $120B in Health Damage — SkimNews
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- The EPA plans to announce Monday a policy eliminating greenhouse gas pollution limits for coal and gas power plants, per the New York Times citing two people familiar with the proposal.
- The rollback would erase $120 billion in public health benefits over the next two decades that current Obama- and Biden-era limits were projected to deliver, with the rollback projected to cause thousands of premature deaths, hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, and tens of thousands of missed school and work days per year.
- EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests, earlier this year stopped calculating human health impacts of policy rollbacks entirely.
- The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but Zeldin claims greenhouse gases are not harmful, setting the rollback up for likely court challenges.
- Coal is already in decline with no new plants being built, and the rollback's practical impact will more likely benefit gas plants powering the rapid expansion of unpopular data centers.
- The fuel efficiency rollback Zeldin has separately pursued will increase costs by $1.4 trillion and raise gas prices by $0.76 per gallon by the administration's own admission.
Why it matters: The rollback effectively rewrites the EPA's statutory duty under the Clean Air Act by letting the agency refuse to regulate greenhouse gases, transferring roughly $120 billion in health costs to American households. The concrete beneficiary isn't reviving coal—it's gas-fired plants powering the data center buildout, which the source notes are already unpopular with ratepayers facing rising electricity bills.
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