Trump throws out power plant climate pollution rules
There couldn’t be a worse time for the US to stop regulating carbon pollution from power plants.
There couldn’t be a worse time for the US to stop regulating carbon pollution from power plants.
by
Justine Calma
Sep 14, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Justine Calma
is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of
Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced its plans today to kill any remaining standards on how much greenhouse gas pollution power plants are allowed to emit in the US. The move will only make electricity dirtier as AI, electric vehicles, and a revival of domestic manufacturing drive up power demand.
The EPA’s proposal today is a major escalation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to promote fossil fuels while making it easier to build out energy-hungry data centers. Environmental and consumer advocates, meanwhile, are fighting back — arguing that Trump’s deregulation spree comes with higher costs for the environment, public health, and Americans’ pocketbooks.
A major escalation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to promote fossil fuels while making it easier to build out energy-hungry data centers
“Failure to limit climate pollution means more children ending up in the emergency room with asthma attacks and heatstroke, more families struggling to rebuild homes after harrowing storms,” Moms Clean Air Force director and cofounder Dominique Browning said in an emailed statement. “It means higher health care bills, higher insurance costs, and more economic struggle at a time when Americans cannot afford it.”
The power sector pumps out aquarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, surpassed only by transportation. In February, the Trump administrationoverturnedthe “endangerment finding”for vehicles. The finding recognized that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations” and allowed the agency to regulate that pollution under the Clean Air Act. Now, the EPA is extending that rollback to power plants.
There is scientific consensus thatgreenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels causes climate change. But in its press release today, the EPA argues that greenhouse gas pollution is “out of its scope to regulate” because its impacts are “global in nature, and any potential public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector.” The US hasproduced more greenhouse gas pollution than any other country in historyand is still aleading carbon emitter after China.
The agency today is finalizing its repeal of Biden-era greenhouse gas requirements for power plants, as well as proposing the elimination of any remaining limits to that climate pollution for the power sector. The EPA claims the finalized rule would save $310 billion while the additional proposed actions would shave off $370 million “in direct compliance costs.”
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Energy, of course, has become a flashpoint in the culture war over affordability.Electricity has gotten more expensivein the US asdemand rises for the first time in over a decadewithmore data centers, factories, and electric vehicles plugging into power grids. At the same time, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has prioritized making America “the AI capital of the world,” ostensibly by slashing environmental regulations for energy-intensive data centers and the gas and coal-fired plants that power them.
The EPA’s proposed changes will be open for public comment for 45 days, and are likely to face a raft of legal challenges. “The Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country,” Sierra Club chief program officer Holly Bender said in an emailed press statement. “While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting.”
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