EPA kills power plant greenhouse gas limits — SkimNews
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- EPA finalized a rule Monday eliminating greenhouse gas pollution limits on coal and gas power plants — reversing standards put in place under Presidents Obama and Biden — with a preliminary Environmental Defense Fund analysis projecting $1 trillion in health costs and $1.8 trillion in climate damages.
- The rollback is projected to 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, according to the source.
- EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, whom the source says received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fossil fuel campaign money over his career, simultaneously proposed a follow-on rule seeking to permanently bar the agency from ever setting power plant pollution limits again — which the source notes runs counter to the Clean Air Act.
- Public comment on the proposed rule was widely opposed, and the source notes EPA earlier this year stopped calculating human health impacts of its policy changes entirely.
- Legal challenges are expected; the source notes courts have been mixed on greenhouse gas cases and that a 2016 court block of Obama's Clean Power Plan cost Americans an estimated $155 billion in lost decade-long savings.
- A future Congress could reverse the rule via the Congressional Review Act with a simple majority within 60 legislative days — a window the source notes will still be open when a new Congress is seated after November.
Why it matters: The rule lifts pollution constraints on coal and gas plants at the same moment data centers are driving new gas-plant construction, and Zeldin's simultaneous proposal would prevent the EPA from ever resetting those limits — though a newly seated Congress could reverse today's action within a 60-legislative-day Congressional Review Act window.
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