US Scraps Limits On Carbon Emissions From Coal, Gas-Fired Power Plants

President Donald Trump's administration on Monday scrapped limits on carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants, the latest in a string of actions dismantling regulations aimed at curbing climate change.

The changes, announced during a G20 energy ministers' meeting in Houston, roll back measures introduced under former president Joe Biden -- and go further, proposing to stop future regulations over the power sector, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.

"For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement.

"The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on," he added. Environmental groups vowed to sue, describing it as a dark day for policies that protect people from the ravages of climate change, and a gift to the fossil fuel industry. 

The news comes amid growing signs of Earth's climate system destabilizing and loading the dice for more frequent and destructive extreme weather events. 

August was the hottest month ever recorded around the world, and the United States just experienced its hottest recorded summer. The main driver of global heating comes from burning fossil fuels, and this year the human-caused warming is stacking on top of a historically intense El Nino weather pattern. 

"They're propping up fossil fuel industry profits and completely sidelining people's health and well-being," Rachel Cleetus of the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, told AFP. "The EPA has deserted its mission entirely, and they're doing it in a way that's cruel. They're gleefully taking credit for it."

The administration has repealed 2024 Biden-era standards that were set under the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gas pollution from existing coal plants and new gas plants. 

These required a reduction of up to 90 percent of carbon dioxide pollution over time, and would have required smokestack carbon capture technology to achieve. 

But in its now finalized rule, the EPA held these standards were impossible to meet and the deadlines too tight.

The second part of the package is a proposed rule that makes a broader statutory argument that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector at all -- and that even if it did have the authority, doing so would be futile because it would not meaningfully address global climate change.

It builds on the government's decision in February to overturn the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.

The agency said that the repeal would save $310 billion, while the proposed rule would save a further $370 million -- figures that critics expressed skepticism towards and vowed to examine. 

Meredith Hankins, a legal expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told AFP that the actions had contradictory legal justifications.

They noted that the technical repeal, at least in the draft phase, stated that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse emissions but found the Biden administration went about it the wrong way.

"We'll have to look at the final text of the rule," Hankins said. "But I think on its face you can see the contradictions. So I'm certainly looking forward to seeing them in court."

Trump often calls human-induced climate change "a hoax," and his policy rollbacks have included withdrawing the United States once more from the Paris climate accord and eliminating greenhouse gas standards for vehicle tailpipe emissions.

"Our government is ignoring the reality all around us that people are feeling every day of the impacts of climate change, and just putting their heads in the sand and saying, 'We don't care, it's not our problem, next generation, figure it out yourselves,'" said Hankins.

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