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On storm damage, the Strait of Hormuz, and Volkswagen’s robotaxi
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
On the Senate Finance Committee’s budget proposal, the NRC, and fossil-fuel financing
On Israel and Iran, G7, and clean-energy jobs
On Trump’s ‘windmill’ ban, FEMA turnover, and PNW power
On the reconciliation bill, power plant regulations, and Climate.gov
The Environmental Protection Agency just unveiled its argument against regulating greenhouse emissions from power plants.
In federal policymaking, the weight of the law can rest on a single word. When it comes to reducing planet-warming emissions from the power sector, that word is “significantly.” The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any stationary source of emissions that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The EPA has considered power plants a significant source of dangerous greenhouse gases since 2015. But today, Trump’s EPA said, actually, never mind.
A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Wednesday argues that U.S. fossil fuel-fired power plants make up “a small and decreasing part of global emissions” and therefore are not significant, and do not require regulation under the law. The rule would repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for new and existing power plants — both the standards the Biden administration finalized last year, which have been tied up in court, as well as the standards that preceded them, which were enacted by Obama in 2015.
In a separate proposal, the EPA also took steps to repeal limits on mercury and hazardous air pollutants from coal plants that were enacted last year, reverting the standard back to one set in 2012.
The argument that U.S. power plants make up a small sliver of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is like having “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
When you add up every plug, power button, and light switch across the country, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year. Over the past 30 years, American power plants have contributed about 5% of the total climate pollution spewed into the atmosphere worldwide.
In the global context, that may sound small. But in a recent report titled “The Scale of Significance," New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that if U.S. power plants were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world, behind China, the European Union, India, Russia, and the remainder of U.S. emissions. The report also notes that U.S. actions on emissions make other countries more likely to follow, due to technological spillovers that reduce the cost of decarbonization globally.
In addition to the significance finding, the EPA gave two other reasons for repealing the power plant rules. It argued that “cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available,” meaning there’s no economic way to reduce emissions at the source. It also said the new administration’s priority “is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The first argument is an attempt to say that Biden’s standards flouted the law. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could not simply tell states to reduce emissions from the power sector, which is what the Obama administration had initially tried to do. Instead, the agency would have to develop standards that could be applied on a plant-by-plant basis — so long as those rules were “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated.”
To comply with that ruling, Biden’s EPA based its standards on the potential to install carbon capture technology that can reduce flue gas emissions by 90%. The regulations would have required existing coal plants to install carbon capture by 2039, or else shut down. (To the chagrin of many energy system observers, the administration chose not to apply limits to existing gas-fired power plants.) But while fossil fuel companies and utilities had, in the past, asserted that carbon capture was viable, they deemed the standards impossible to meet.
Trump’s EPA is now agreeing. “In 2024,” Zeldin said on Wednesday, “rules were enacted seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment, to make all sorts of industries including coal and more disappear, regulate them out of existence.”
When Trump moved to overturn Obama’s power plant regulations during his first term, his EPA did not contest the significance of the sector’s emissions, and simply enacted a weaker standard. A week before he left office, the agency also finalized a rule that set the threshold for “significance” at 3% of U.S. emissions — which exempted major polluters like refineries, but still applied to power plants.
This time, Trump has a new apparent game plan: Strip the Clean Air Act of its jurisdiction over greenhouse gases altogether. Today’s action was the first step; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency will similarly “reconsider” emissions rules for cars and oil and gas drilling. But the cornerstone of the plan is to reverse what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases present a threat to public health and welfare, and therefore are one of the pollutants EPA must address under the Clean Air Act.
“The Trump administration is trying to say, don’t worry about the Clean Air Act. It will never apply, so you can go back to your old ways,” said Doniger. But if the argument that power plant emissions are insignificant is a stretch, appraising greenhouse gas emissions as benign is inconceivable, he said. “The endangerment finding was based, in 2009, on a Denali-sized mountain of evidence. Since then, it’s grown to Everest-size, so there’s no way that they would be able to put together a rational record saying the science is wrong.”
These highly technical questions of whether emissions are “significant” or whether carbon capture is “adequately demonstrated” could soon be determined by a group of people who lack both the expertise to answer them and the inclination to wade through thousands of pages of atmospheric science and chemical engineering documents: judges.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a long-held precedent known as Chevron deference. That ruling means that the courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of statute — judges must make their own determinations of whether agencies are following the intent of the law.
When environmental groups begin challenging the EPA’s repeals in court, judges are “going to be bombarded with the need to make these highly technical, nuanced decisions,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University, told me. He said the reason Chevron deference was established in the first place is that judges didn’t want to be making engineering decisions about power plants. “They felt extremely uncomfortable having to make these calls.”
The conservative Supreme Court overturned the precedent because of a sense that political decisions were being dressed up in scientific reasoning. But Wara doesn’t think the courts are going to like being put back into the role of weighing technical minutia and making engineering decisions.
“It’s a past that the courts didn’t like and they tried to engineer a way out of via the Chevron doctrine,” he said. “I would expect that we’re going to see a drift back toward a doctrine that looks a little bit more Chevron-like, maybe less deference to agencies. But it’s hard to predict in the current environment what’s going to happen.”
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.