Cost Savings and Future Regulations

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stated at a news conference in Houston on Monday that the changes would eliminate more than $300 billion in costs for power plants. The agency also proposed a separate rule, expected to be made final next year, that could prevent future administrations from returning and again regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Environmental Concerns and Legal Challenges

Environmental groups have criticized the move, warning it will come at a cost to the health of Americans and further degrade the environment. Maggie Coulter, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said denying the existence of a quarter of the country’s climate pollution is “utterly reckless.”

The EPA has rolled back a series of environmental oversight rules since US President Trump returned to office in 2025. In February, it revoked a 2009 scientific finding that determined carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, a stance that allowed for regulation of motor vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources of air pollution.

Health and environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the revocation of that finding in February, saying it will risk the health and welfare of US citizens. The rescinding of restrictions on coal and gas power plant emissions announced on Monday is expected to similarly be challenged in court.

Political and Global Reactions

Democratic Senator Patty Murray, who represents the northwestern state of Washington, said in a statement on X that Trump wants to let power plants pollute as much as they want, resulting in serious health risks for families, our water and air, and the entire planet. The announcement was made on the sidelines of a G20 ministerial meeting in Houston on “energy abundance,” highlighting the role of oil-rich Texas in the energy industry.

Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at a speech to the United Nations last year, and his administration withdrew the US — for the second time — from the 2015 Paris climate accord that sets voluntary goals to curb planet-warming emissions. The US president has boasted of US energy abundance even as the Iran war continues to disrupt global fuel markets and gas prices top $4.31 a gallon ($1.14 per litre), up more than a dollar from a year ago.

The rollbacks are meant to fulfill Trump’s repeated pledge to “unleash American energy” and make it easier for utilities to supply electricity for homes and businesses. The power plant rule is among nearly three dozen environmental regulations that EPA’s Zeldin targeted in early 2025 when he announced what he called the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history.”

Zeldin said in proposing the new rules last year that they were meant to end the “war on so much of our US domestic energy supply” by former President Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s administrations. Environmental and public health groups called the rollbacks dangerous and pledged to challenge the rules in court.

Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said tearing down national protections against climate pollution from power plants will have enormous costs for the health, safety, and well-being of families across the country. Americans everywhere are already suffering from record-breaking heat, more dangerous floods and storms, and skyrocketing insurance costs.

Coal, gas, and oil-fired power plants are responsible for about one-quarter of the nation’s total climate pollution, second only to the transportation sector, while Pollution from power plants is one of the largest sources of climate-changing pollution in the world.

The rules targeted by Trump’s EPA could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated Press analysis last year that included the agency’s own prior assessments and a wide range of other research. Even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury, and lead—and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems, the AP analysis found. It would also mean higher emissions of greenhouse gases, driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels.

Biden, a Democrat, had made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency; Coal-fired power plants would have been forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a strict EPA rule issued in 2024. Those rules are now being upended. In its proposal last year, the EPA argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-fired power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change and therefore do not meet a threshold under the Clean Air Act for regulatory action.

Greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired plants “are a small and decreasing part of global emissions,” the EPA said. Zeldin, a Republican and former congressman, said Biden-era actions were designed to “suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment,” with the intent to regulate the coal industry “out of existence” and make it “disappear.” The coal industry and groups representing coal-fired power plants have denounced the Biden rule as “overreach” by the EPA and urged its repeal. Lifting the rule will protect grid reliability and shield electricity consumers from higher costs at a time of surging demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing, according to America’s Power, a trade organisation for the US coal fleet.