The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed axing or reforming major Biden-era rules on power plants on Wednesday.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced to reporters that his agency is moving to repeal the Biden administration’s signature emissions rules for power plants and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rules, both of which strictly regulated power plants. The announcement is part of a broader deregulatory agenda from the Trump administration that aims to terminate stringent Biden-era rules that burdened the industry and would lead to exorbitant electricity costs and a weaker grid if fully implemented, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation previously.
“Both Obama and Biden erected every barrier, proposed every regulation — even some unlawful ones — to do whatever they could think of to thwart American energy,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday. “The good news is, those days are over … This action is only a proposal. If finalized, no power plant will be allowed to emit more than they do today or as much as they did a few years ago.”
Officially titled the “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants” and referred to by critics as the Clean Power Plan 2.0, the Biden administration finalized the power plant rules in April 2024 and aimed to effectively force all coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants to reduce their carbon emissions by 90% via carbon capture and sequestration technology within approximately 15 years in order to continue operating.
Critics have described the EPA’s proposal as an impractical backdoor attempt to achieve outcomes similar to those of the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan,” which the Supreme Court struck down in 2022. In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA overstepped its authority as an administrative agency in attempting to implement the plan.
The MATS rules aimed to enforce mercury and other emissions reductions standards on some coal-fired power plants, and Zeldin noted in Wednesday remarks that his agency intends to reform those rules rather than do away with them altogether. Though the Biden administration asserted that these regulations were critical steps to combat climate change and would not compromise grid reliability, energy sector experts explained to the DCNF that the rules could lead to significant reliability challenges and economic damages if fully enacted as intended.
The EPA did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
