President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to wipe out federal limits on power plants’ climate pollution — attacking the Biden era’s most ambitious attempt to use regulations to lessen the nation’s output of heat-trapping gases.
EPA announced Wednesday that it would scrap the 2024 regulation that requires existing coal-burning power plants, and future plants burning natural gas, to begin capturing their carbon dioxide pollution in the 2030s. The Trump proposal would leave the nation’s second-largest source of climate pollution — the power sector — free of federal requirements to address global warming.
The first Trump administration repealed a similar rule that had been written under former President Barack Obama and replaced it with a weaker regulation.
The United States is the world’s second-biggest climate polluter, lagging only behind China. But in its draft rule, EPA argues that the U.S. power sector’s pollution by itself doesn’t significantly contribute to global climate change, making it unnecessary to regulate it.
The administration also announced it would repeal a separate Biden-era rule aimed at reducing power plants’ releases of toxic mercury into the air.
