Photograph by mrs / Getty Images
words by miranda green
Standing on stage before a group of world leaders earlier this week, the head of the United States agency responsible for clean air, good health, and a flourishing environment announced the federal government would weaken a rule that does just that.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Monday announced the repeal of most of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas requirements for coal and gas power plants—and proposed to eliminate what remains. Power plants are the second-largest source of CO2 emissions in the country.
He said the reason for the policy change, first proposed last year, was economics:
“Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices, but this is just the beginning. We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed. Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices, and a more prosperous America.”
Zeldin delivered the remarks during the EPA’s first-ever G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial, a three-day event held in “The Energy Capital of the World”: Houston, Texas.
The EPA characterized the event as an opportunity to bring together ministers from some of the world’s wealthiest countries and business leaders to provide “businesses the certainty they need to invest and build.”
In attendance were the CEO of U.S. energy company Entergy, along with Chevron’s executive vice president of Oil, Products & Gas. A delegation from Venezuela was a surprise guest. The country is not a member of the G20, but the U.S. announced earlier this month that the two struck a deal to increase American control over oil production in the South American country.
The event comes a week before international leaders are slated to meet in New York City for the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly. When President Donald Trump attended the event last year, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
The G20 event and EPA’s announcement set the stage for the messaging we can all expect to hear from the White House next week.
But they also sent another message. Buried in the agency’s platitudes about saving money is further evidence that the agency has not just shifted its priorities, but arguably abdicated its role as environmental protector.
Zeldin promised that “the United States is proving that we can protect human health and the environment while growing our economy and getting important projects built,” but he never explained how it’s able to do both with this change.
There’s no question that the EPA hindering its own ability to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act will save the fossil fuel industry money. Without the rule, power plant operators will no longer have to make investments required to meet emissions standards, including in carbon capture and storage technology. It could also keep some coal-fired power plants open longer—an effort the government has been actively supporting through controversial orders that forced plants to remain open despite plans to retire.
Here’s what we also know:
So what about the human and ecological toll?
The EPA was established in 1970 during the Nixon administration to mitigate worsening air and water pollution. Industry has pushed back on its regulations since its inception. But politicians on both sides of the aisle—including a Republican president—recognized the need for the federal government to step in when human and environmental health was at stake.
Whether climate change is part of the EPA’s mandate is a more complicated debate. Obama’s capstone Clean Power Plan, which aimed to set the first national limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016 and formally replaced by the EPA when Trump took office the following year. Former President Joe Biden set his own power plant rule focused on greenhouse gases—and it’s those standards the Trump administration is now dismantling.
Republicans and industry execs have long argued it’s not within the purview of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases for the purpose of addressing climate change. The Trump EPA is now making that argument explicitly, contending that the Clean Air Act does not authorize the agency to regulate power plant emissions in response to global climate change concerns.
But carbon emissions are also a health concern. Fossil fuel combustion produces pollutants that contribute to ground-level ozone and health issues like asthma. Carbon dioxide also drives rising atmospheric temperatures, which contribute to extreme heat and can exacerbate conditions associated with drought, wildfires, and flooding.
The truth is, science shows it’s impossible to fully decouple the health consequences of burning fossil fuels from their impact on the planet—the two are intrinsically interconnected.
But that doesn’t mean the Trump administration isn’t trying. Other rollbacks we’ve seen from the EPA in the past year include revoking the foundational scientific finding for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, which led to the elimination of federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks.
The EPA’s perspective on what—or whom—it aims to protect seems clear in its representatives’ own words and actions.
Zeldin on Monday promised that the power plant rule reversal would save Americans and the power sector up to $310 billion. But the EPA also offered another interpretation of the changes.
According to an analysis by EPA staff in 2024, Biden’s power plant rule, if left in place, would have delivered $370 billion in net benefits. In 2035 alone, the agency estimated that the air-quality improvements delivered via regulations would prevent 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 cases of asthma symptoms.
But some of those numbers can no longer be considered by the EPA, because Trump earlier this year eliminated yet another measurement—a way to calculate the dollar benefit of saving lives.
For decades, the agency used the “value of a statistical life,” currently estimated at $11.7 million, to help quantify the benefits of regulations that prevent premature deaths. Now, that value is effectively $0 in the agency’s regulatory cost-benefit calculations.
As the EPA makes industry benefits from regulatory rollbacks abundantly clear, each policy change makes it increasingly difficult to show just how much the public stands to lose from the same actions.
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A Defanged EPA Offers Few Protections for the American People
