The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will repeal rules limiting emissions from coal and gas power plants, in a move that would override decades of protections aimed at curbing gases that scientists say cause global warming.
“Under President (Donald) Trump’s leadership, Americans have been demanding more common sense from our federal agencies,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Monday at a news conference in Houston. “That means eliminating red tape so we can build new power generation infrastructure.”
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The EPA estimates that this change will save power plants more than $300 billion in costs. The agency has also proposed another rule, expected to be finalized next year, that could prevent a future administration from returning and re-regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Lifting restrictions is sure to be challenged by environmental groups, who say it will come at the expense of Americans’ health and further degrade the environment. EPA officials said the changes will allow utilities to make decisions that are best for ratepayers, rather than forcing them to shut down aging or inefficient power plants.
“Denying the existence of a quarter of this country’s climate pollution is completely reckless,” said Maggie Coulter, a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “It would cost many more lives and cause us to suffer from the intense heatwaves, severe storms and devastating wildfires we saw this summer.”
Since President Trump returned to office in 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back a series of environmental monitoring rules.
In February, the government revoked a 2009 scientific study that found carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatened public health and welfare, and rescinded its position allowing regulations on cars, power plants and other industrial sources of air pollution.
At the time, President Trump praised the changes, calling them “the greatest deregulatory move in American history.”
Health and environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit in February seeking to overturn the findings, saying they endanger the health and well-being of the American public.
The rollback of emissions regulations for coal and gas power plants announced on Monday is also expected to be challenged in court.
“President Trump wants to let power plants pollute as much as he wants, which will pose serious health risks to families, our water and air, and our entire planet,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who represents northwest Washington state, said in a statement on X. “Americans want clean air and clean water, and we all need to speak up to stop this.”
Monday’s announcement was made on the sidelines of the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Wealth in Houston. It was both a nod to the important role oil-rich Texas plays in the energy industry and a potential scorn from European and other international allies in attendance who have promoted green policies that the Trump administration is seeking to reverse.
President Trump called climate change “the greatest fraud the world has ever seen” in a speech at the United Nations last year, and his administration for the second time pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which set voluntary targets to curb global warming emissions.
The president has touted America’s energy abundance even as the Iran war continues to disrupt global fuel markets and gasoline prices have topped $4.31 a gallon ($1.14 a litre), more than $1 more than a year ago.
The cuts are aimed at fulfilling President Trump’s repeated pledge to “free up America’s energy” and make it easier for power companies to provide power to homes and businesses.
The power plant rule is one of about 30 environmental regulations targeted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Zeldin in early 2025, when he made an announcement that he called “the most significant day of deregulation in American history.”
When Zeldin proposed the new rules last year, he said the goal was to end the “war on much of America’s domestic energy supply” by the administrations of former President Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
“Huge cost”
Environmental and public health groups called the rollback dangerous and vowed to challenge the rules in court.
“Eliminating the nation’s protections against climate pollution from power plants will have significant costs to the health, safety, and well-being of families across the country,” said Vicki Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. “Americans around the world are already suffering from record heat, more dangerous floods and storms, and rising insurance premiums.”
Patton said the EPA has a legal responsibility to protect the public from harmful pollution, adding that “clean, affordable and reliable technology is widely available to power homes and businesses.”
Coal, gas, and oil-fired power plants are responsible for about a quarter of the country’s total climate pollution, second only to the transportation sector. Pollution from power plants is one of the biggest sources of pollution causing global climate change.
The rules targeted by President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion a year as long as they remain in place, according to an Associated Press analysis last year that included the agency’s own preliminary evaluation and other extensive research.
Even if the rules were partially lifted, it would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead, especially airborne particles that can lodge in the lungs and cause health problems, the AP analysis found. It also means that greenhouse gas emissions will increase, pushing global warming to more dangerous levels.
Democrat Biden has made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency. Coal-fired power plants would have been forced to capture or shut down emissions from their stacks under strict EPA rules issued in 2024. These rules are now being overturned.
In its proposal last year, the EPA argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuel-fired power plants do not constitute “hazardous pollution” or contribute significantly to climate change, and therefore do not meet the criteria for regulatory action under the Clean Air Act. The EPA said greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants “represent a small and declining portion of global emissions.”
Zeldin, a Republican and former congressman, said the Biden administration-era actions were aimed at “suffocating the economy to protect the environment” and were intended to regulate the coal industry so it would “disappear” and “disappear.”
Groups representing the coal industry and coal-fired power plants denounced the Biden rule as an “overreach” by the EPA and called for its repeal.
America’s Power, a trade group for U.S. coal-fired power plants, said repealing the rule would protect the reliability of the power grid and protect electricity consumers from higher costs as demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and other industries surges.
