EPA set to roll back rules that limit greenhouse gases and mercury from US power plants
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to eliminate rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas, part of a wide-ranging rollback of environmental regulations that Administrator Lee Zeldin has said would remove trillions of dollars in costs and 'unleash' American energy.
The EPA also plans to weaken a regulation that requires power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants that can harm brain development of young children and contribute to heart attacks and other health problems in adults.
The planned rollbacks, set to be announced Wednesday, are meant to fulfill President Trump's repeated pledge to 'unleash American energy' and make it more affordable for Americans to power their homes and operate businesses.
If approved and made final, the plans would reverse efforts by President Joe Biden's administration to address climate change and improve conditions in areas heavily burdened by industrial pollution, mostly in low-income and majority Black or Hispanic communities.
The power plant rules are among about 30 environmental regulations that Zeldin targeted in March when he announced what he called the 'most consequential day of deregulation in American history.' He said the actions would put a 'dagger through the heart of climate-change religion' and introduce a 'Golden Age' for the American economy.
Environmental groups vowed to challenge the rules in court.
'Power plants are among the largest sources of dangerous pollution in the nation. We have modern technologies that allow these plants to reduce pollution with available and cost-effective solutions,' said Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund.
The clean-air standards targeted by the EPA under Trump, a Republican, 'are protecting people across America today and will safeguard future generations,'' Patton said.
'Ignoring the immense harm to public health from power plant pollution is a clear violation of the law,'' added Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'Our lawyers will be watching closely, and if EPA finalizes a slapdash effort to repeal those rules, we'll see them in court.'
The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated Press examination that included the agency's own prior assessments and a wide range of other research.
It's by no means guaranteed that the rules will be entirely eliminated — they can't be changed without going through a federal rulemaking process that can take years and requires public comment and scientific justification.
Even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems, the AP analysis found. It would also mean higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth's warming to deadlier levels.
Biden, a Democrat, had made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency. Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a strict EPA rule issued last year. Then-EPA head Michael Regan said the power plant rules — the Biden administration's most ambitious effort to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector — would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting a reliable, long-term supply of electricity.
The power sector is the nation's second-largest contributor to climate change, after transportation.
In its proposed regulation, the Trump EPA argues that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-fired power plants 'do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution' or to climate change and therefore do not meet a threshold under the Clean Air Act for regulatory action.
A paper published earlier this year in the journal Science found the Biden-era rules could reduce U.S. power sector carbon emissions by 73% to 86% below 2005 levels by 2040, compared with a reduction of 60% to 83% without the rules.
'Our research shows that EPA's power plant rules make substantial strides to protect human health and the environment,'' said Aaron Bergman, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institution and a co-author of the Science paper.
'Carbon emissions in the power sector drop at a faster rate with the (Biden-era) rules in place than without them,'' Bergman said in an email. 'And we also would have seen significant reductions in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, pollutants that harm human health.'
Daly writes for the Associated Press.
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The Department of Education's 'Dear Colleague' letters are supposed to be nonbinding guidance on what existing law requires, not new policy making. Yet the Obama administration was claiming that, to comply with the law, every institution had to adopt new policies that no institution had previously thought were required. The administration went on to investigate dozens of schools for departing from its novel interpretation of Title IX. Behind each probe was a threat: Comply or lose federal funding. The pressure tactic worked. Colleges throughout the United States hired new administrators and lawyers. Many of those expanded campus bureaucracies went on to engage in illiberal excesses. A punitive apparatus 'was being built, expanded, and deployed' to regulate conduct 'further and further from the core cases of sexual assault than most people imagined,' the Harvard law professors Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob E. Gersen later wrote in a law-review article. 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Greg Lukianoff: Trump's attacks threaten much more than Harvard Trump's team was not the first to apply Obama's Title IX enforcement model to Title VI. After Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Palestine-aligned protests erupted on many campuses, political appointees at Biden's Department of Education issued a letter to clarify colleges' obligation to protect the rights of both Jewish and Arab students. The letter noted that protected speech wasn't unlawful. But it also said that some protected speech could contribute to a hostile environment that violates the Title VI rights of students, obligating a response from administrators. Once again, colleges were in a double bind: Cracking down on protected speech would create legal liability, but so would failing to respond to speech that the state deemed anti-Semitic. Scores of investigations for alleged failures to protect the rights of Jewish students quickly followed. The Knight First Amendment Institute concluded that there was good reason to believe that the Biden team was 'leveraging its power to regulate discrimination' to force crackdowns on 'protected student and faculty speech.' The Gersens felt that history was repeating itself. Their aforementioned paper goes on to show how the Office of Civil Rights under Biden once again created incentives for colleges to 'over-police and over-punish' students and faculty, this time relying on Title VI. Driving out discrimination 'is a laudable goal,' the Gersens write, but pursuing it 'may also produce far ranging negative consequences that go to the heart of the academic mission.' The new Trump administration has policed Title VI even more fervently, with initiatives from the White House and multiple federal agencies. In statements and executive orders, Trump has put colleges on notice, vowing to combat anti-Semitism and to treat all DEI initiatives as suspect (though guidance from the Department of Education seems to have softened that position). Trump has suggested that colleges should 'monitor' foreign students and staffers for anti-Semitism and 'report' their activities to the feds in case the students are eligible to be deported. Another executive order pressures college accreditors to strip the accreditation status of institutions accused of wrongdoing by civil-rights bureaucrats. The Department of Education has launched various kinds of Title VI probes of more than 50 institutions and sent letters to 60 institutions warning of potential enforcement unless they act 'to protect Jewish students.' At the Department of Justice, the civil-rights attorney Leo Terrell is leading a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; at the end of February, he announced visits to 10 campuses, and on March 7, the administration announced that Columbia would lose at least $400 million in federal grants 'due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.' According to The New York Times, the Justice Department also recently demanded that the University of Virginia push out its president to 'help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts'; the president resigned on Friday. As a critic of DEI and anti-Semitism, I understand the impulse to crack down on both, much as I understood the impulse to crack down on sexual violence. But the administration's approach guarantees the same bureaucratic bloat and illiberal excesses that characterized Title IX enforcement. Two of the administration's primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university 'complete disciplinary proceedings' related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to 'centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.' What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution 'formalize, adopt, and promulgate' a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin 'placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership' for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom. In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state's purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce 'the power held by students and untenured faculty' in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions 'must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,' it states. Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter's terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration's enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard's lawsuit, the organization declared that the state's 'coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.' An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn't how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice. Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy's illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next. Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn't automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions. Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the 'regulation by intimidation' that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible. It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration's glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump's team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits.
