EPA Drops Power Plant Pollution Limits, Costing $120B — SkimNews
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- The EPA plans to announce Monday a policy eliminating greenhouse gas pollution limits on coal and gas power plants, per a New York Times report citing two people familiar with the proposal.
- Lee Zeldin's rollback would erase $120 billion in public health benefits established under Presidents Obama and Biden, and according to prior EPA estimates would cause thousands of premature deaths, hundreds of emergency room visits, hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, and tens of thousands of missed school and work days per year.
- The EPA stopped calculating human health impacts of its policy changes earlier this year, meaning the agency will not officially acknowledge the harm from this rollback.
- Zeldin's larger fuel efficiency rollback is set to increase costs by $1.4 trillion and raise gas prices by $0.76 per gallon, per the administration's own estimate, putting the $120 billion power plant rollback in context.
- The Department of Energy spent billions on coal subsidies and banned the words "climate change," while the Department of the Interior illegally committed billions to buying out offshore wind developments; a court blocked a separate EPA attempt to stop California and 16 other states from cleaning their air.
- Courts have been mixed on greenhouse gas cases: Obama's Clean Power Plan was blocked in 2016 despite $155 billion in projected savings this decade, and the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — making Zeldin's refusal to do so a direct legal flashpoint.
- Coal is not growing and no new coal plants are being built, while solar and wind account for the vast majority of new generation capacity, suggesting the rollback's main practical effect may be enabling gas plants built to power data centers rather than reviving coal.
Why it matters: Americans face $120 billion in foregone health benefits and thousands of preventable deaths per year from a rollback led by an EPA chief who has received hundreds of thousands from fossil fuel interests. The agency has already stopped quantifying the human health costs of its own policies, shielding the move from its own internal accounting. Coal likely won't rebound regardless — the practical effect is clearing regulatory ground for gas plants powering unpopular data centers.
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