President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday scrapped limits on carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants, the latest in a string of actions dismantling regulations aimed at curbing climate change.
The changes, announced during a G20 energy ministers’ meeting in Houston, roll back measures introduced under former president Joe Biden and go further, proposing to stop future regulations over the power sector, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups vowed to sue, describing it as a dark day for policies that protect people from the ravages of climate change, and a gift to the fossil fuel industry. The administration has repealed 2024 Biden-era standards that were set under the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gas pollution from existing coal plants and new gas plants.
“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” he added.
It builds on the government’s decision in February to overturn the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.
“Our government is ignoring the reality all around us that people are feeling every day of the impacts of climate change, and just putting their heads in the sand and saying, ‘We don’t care, it’s not our problem, next generation, figure it out yourselves,'” said Hankins.
The agency said that the repeal would save $310 billion, while the proposed rule would save a further $370 million figures that critics expressed skepticism towards and vowed to examine.
