In April 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave America’s coal and gas plants an ultimatum: capture most of your carbon dioxide emissions or close. On September 14, the agency withdrew the order. The repeal corrects one of the most reckless regulatory actions of the past decade.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the decision at a G20 “energy abundance” meeting in Houston. He scrapped most of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards and proposed rescinding every remaining greenhouse gas standard for power plants.
The Government Accountability Office’s review of the repeal shows that EPA calculated savings of $95 billion to $160 billion. Utilities would have sunk that money into machinery never shown to be effective in the real world, and the cost would have landed on monthly electricity bills.
The purpose was obvious from the start: Set a bar plants could not clear and force them to go out of business. The Supreme Court had already rebuked the agency in West Virginia v. EPA for trying to redraw the nation’s fuel mix through the Clean Air Act. The Biden administration simply tried again by another route.
PJM, which runs the grid for 67 million people in 13 states and Washington, D.C., had warned that 40 gigawatts of generation could retire by 2030, with 25 gigawatts of that driven by policy. In addition, replacement capacity is arriving too slowly, according to the grid operator. The current administration’s EPA now acknowledges that the old standards required technology that was not adequately demonstrated.
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