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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.”
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All of the administration’s anti-wind actions in one place.
The Trump administration’s war on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry has kicked into high gear over the past week, with a stop work order issued on a nearly fully-built project, grant terminations, and court filings indicating that permits for several additional projects will soon be revoked.
These actions are just the latest moves in what has been a steady stream of attacks beginning on the first day Trump stepped into the White House. He appears to be following a policy wishlist that anti-offshore wind activists submitted to his transition team almost to a T. As my colleague Jael Holzman reported back in January, those recommendations included stop work orders, reviews related to national security, tax credit changes, and a series of agency studies, such as asking the Health and Human Services to review wind turbines’ effects on electromagnetic fields — all of which we’ve seen done.
It’s still somewhat baffling as to why Trump would go so far as to try and shut down a nearly complete, 704-megawatt energy project, especially when his administration claims to be advancing “energy addition, NOT subtraction.” But it’s helpful to see the trajectory all in one place to understand what the administration has accomplished — and how much is still up in the air.
January 20: Trump issues a presidential memorandum temporarily halting all new onshore and offshore wind permitting and leasing activities “in light of various alleged legal deficiencies underlying the Federal Government’s leasing and permitting of onshore and offshore wind projects,” while his administration conducts an assessment of federal review practices. The memo also temporarily withdraws all areas on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing.
March 14: The Environmental Protection Agency pulls a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, which was set to deliver power into New Jersey.
April 16: The Department of the Interior issues a stop work order to Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind farm that began construction in 2024. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum accuses the Biden administration of giving the project a “rushed approval” that was “built on bad and flawed science,” citing feedback from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
May 1: The Interior Department withdraws a Biden-era legal opinion for how to conduct permitting in line with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that advised the Secretary to “strike a rational balance” between wind energy and fishing. The Department reinstated the opinion issued under Trump’s first term, which was more favorable to the fishing industry.
May 2: Anti-offshore wind group Green Oceans sends a 68-page report titled “Cancelling Offshore Wind Leases” to Secretary Burgum and acting Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management Adam Suess, according to emails uncovered by E&E News. The report “evaluates potential violations of Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and related Federal laws in addition to those generally associated with environmental protection.”
May 5: Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s January 20 memo halting federal approvals of wind projects.
May 19: The Interior Department lifts the stop work order on Empire Wind after closed-door meetings between New York governor Kathy Hochul and President Trump, during which the White House later says that Hochul “caved” to allowing “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York. Hochul denies reaching any deal on pipelines during the meetings.
June 4: Atlantic Shores files a request with New Jersey regulators to cancel its contract to sell energy into the state.
July 4: Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposes new expiration dates on tax credits for wind and solar projects, including offshore wind, as well as on the manufacture of wind turbine components.
July 7: The Environmental Protection Agency notifies the Maryland Department of the Environment that the state office erred when issuing an air permit to the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, also known as MarWin, because the state specified that petitions to review the permit would go to state court rather than the federal agency. The state later disagrees.
July 17: New York regulators cancel plans to develop additional transmission capacity for future offshore wind development, citing “significant federal uncertainty.”
July 29: The Interior Department issues an order requesting reports that describe and provide recommendations for “trends in environmental impacts from onshore and offshore wind projects on wildlife” and the impacts that approved offshore wind projects might have on “military readiness.” The order also asserts that the Biden administration misapplied federal law when it approved the construction and operation plans of offshore wind projects.
July 30: The Interior Department rescinds all designated “wind energy areas” on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which had been deemed suitable for offshore wind development.
August 5: The Interior Department eliminates a requirement to publish a five-year schedule of offshore wind energy lease sales and to update the lease sale schedule every two years.
August 7: The Interior Department initiates a review of offshore wind energy regulations “to ensure alignment with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.”
August 13: The Department of Commerce initiates an investigation into whether imports of onshore and offshore wind turbine components threaten national security, a precursor to imposing tariffs.
New Jersey regulators also decide to delay offshore wind transmission upgrades by two years. They officially cancel their contract with Atlantic Shores.
August 22: The Interior Department issues a stop work order on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind project set to deliver power to Rhode Island and Connecticut, citing national security concerns. The 65-turbine project is already 80% complete.
Interior also says in a court filing that it intends to “vacate its approval” of the Construction and Operations Plan for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
August 29: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it “intends to reconsider” its approval of the construction and operations plan for the SouthCoast wind project, which was set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The Department of Transportation also withdraws or terminates $679 million for 12 offshore wind port infrastructure projects to “ensure federal dollars are prioritized towards restoring America’s maritime dominance” by “rebuilding America’s shipbuilding capacity, unleashing more reliable, traditional forms of energy, and utilizing the nation’s bountiful natural resources to unleash American energy.” The grants include:
September 3: The Interior Department says in a court filing that it intends to vacate its approval of the construction and operations plan for Avangrid’s New England Wind 1 and 2, which were set to deliver power to Massachusetts.
The New York Times also reports that the White House has instructed “a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry,” including asking the Department of Health and Human Services to study “whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health,” and asking the Defense Department to probe “whether the projects could pose risks to national security.”
September 4: The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as Orsted, file lawsuits challenging the stop work order on Revolution Wind.
At the start of all this, the U.S. had three offshore wind projects that were fully operational and five that were under construction. As of today, the Trump administration has halted just one of those five, but it has threatened to rescind approvals for each and every remaining fully permitted project that hasn’t yet broken ground.
The tumult has rippled out into the states, where regulators in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are delaying plans to sign contracts to procure additional energy from offshore wind projects.
Looking ahead, we can expect a few things to happen over the next few weeks. We’ll see the Interior Department formally begin to rescind permits, as it indicated it would do in numerous court filings. We’ll also likely get an opinion from a federal court in Massachusetts in the case that states filed fighting Trump’s Day One memo. Orsted also said it intends to ask for a temporary injunction, so it’s possible that Revolution Wind could resume construction soon.
It’s been barely a month since Jael dubbed the Trump administration’s tactics a “total war on wind.” While the result hasn’t been a complete shutdown of the industry, it seems he might still be in the early stages of his plan.
The Nimbus wind project in the Ozark Mountains is moving forward even without species permits, while locals pray Trump will shut it down.
The state of Arkansas is quickly becoming an important bellwether for the future of renewable energy deployment in the U.S., and a single project in the state’s famed Ozark Mountains might be the big fight that decides which way the state’s winds blow.
Arkansas has not historically been a renewables-heavy state, and very little power there is generated from solar or wind today. But after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state saw a surge in project development, with more than 1.5 gigawatts of mostly utility-scale solar proposed in 2024, according to industry data. The state also welcomed its first large wind farm that year.
As in other states – Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – this spike in development led to a fresh wave of opposition and grassroots organizing against development. At least six Arkansas counties currently have active moratoria on solar or wind development, according to Heatmap Pro data. Unlike other states, Arkansas has actually gone there this year by passing a law restricting wind development and requiring all projects to have minimum setbacks on wind turbines from neighboring property owners of at least 3.5-times the height of the wind turbine itself, which can be as far as a quarter of a mile.
But activists on the ground still want more. Specifically, they want to stop Scout Clean Energy’s Nimbus wind project, which appears to have evaded significant barriers from either the new state law or a local ordinance blocking future wind development in Carroll County, the project’s future home. This facility is genuinely disliked by many on the ground in Carroll County; for weeks now, I have been monitoring residents posting to Facebook with updates on the movements of wind turbine components and their impacts to traffic. I’ve also seen the grumbling about it travel from the mouths of residents living near the project site to conservative social media influencers and influential figures in conservative energy policy circles.
The Nimbus project is also at considerable risk of federal intervention in some fashion. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Nimbus applied to the Fish and Wildlife Service for incidental take approval covering golden eagles and endangered bats throughout the course of its operation. This turned into a multi-year effort to craft a conservation plan in tandem with permitting applications that are all pending approval from federal officials.
Scout Clean Energy still had not received permission by the time FWS changed hands to Trump 2.0, though – putting not only its permit but the project itself in potential legal risk. In addition, activists have recently seized upon risks floated by the Defense Department during development around the potential for the turbines to negatively impact radar capabilities, which previously resulted in the developer planning towers of varying heights for the blades.
These risks aren’t unique to Nimbus. Some of this is a reflection of how wind projects are generally so large and impactful that they wind up eventually landing in a federal nexus. But in this particular case, the fact that it seemed nothing could halt this project made me wonder if Trump was on the minds of people in Carroll County, too.
That’s how I wound up on the phone with Caroline Rogers, a woman living on Bradshaw Mountain near the Nimbus project site, who told me she has been fighting it since she first learned about it in 2023. Rogers and I chatted for almost an hour and, candidly, I found her to be an incredibly nice individual. When I asked her why she’s against the wind farm, she brought up a bunch of reasons I couldn’t necessarily fault her for, like concerns about property values and a lack of local civil services to support the community if there were a turbine failure or fire at the site.
“I still pray every day,” she told me when I asked her about whether she wants an outside force – à la Trump – to come in and do something to stop the facility. “There have been projects that have been stopped for various reasons, and there have been turbines that have been taken down.”
One of the things Rogers hopes happens is that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s bird crackdown comes for the Nimbus project, which is under construction even as it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get the take permits under the Trump administration. “Maybe it can be more of an enforcement [action],” she told me. “I hope it happens.”
This is where Trump’s unprecedented approach to energy development – and the curtailment of it – would have to cross a new rubicon. The Fish and Wildlife Service has rarely exercised its bird protection enforcement abilities against wind projects because of a significant and recent backlog in the permitting process related to applications from the sector. Bill Eubanks, an environmental attorney who works on renewables conflicts, told me earlier this week that if a developer is told by the agency it needs a permit, then “they’re on notice if they kill an eagle.” But while enforcement powers have been used before, it is “not that common.”
Even Rogers knows intervention from federal species regulators would be a potentially unprecedented step. “It can never stop a project that I’ve seen,” she told me.
Yet if Trump were to empower FWS to go after wind projects for violating species statutes, it is precisely this backlog that would make projects like Nimbus a potential target.
“They got so many applications from developers, and each one takes so much staff time to finalize,” Eubanks told me. “Even before January 20, there was already a significant backlog.”
Scout Clean Energy did not respond to requests for comment. If I hear from them or the Fish and Wildlife Service, I will let you know.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Newport County, Rhode Island – The Trump administration escalated its onslaught against the offshore wind sector in the past week … coincidentally (or not) right after a New England-based anti-wind organization requested that it do so.
2. Madison County, New York – Officials in this county are using a novel method to target a wind project: They’re claiming it’ll disrupt 911 calls.
3. Wells County, Indiana – A pro-solar organization is apparently sending mass texts to people in this county asking them to sign a petition opposing a county-wide moratorium on new projects.
4. Henderson County, Kentucky – Planning officials in this county have recommended a two-year moratorium on wind power, sending the matter to a final vote before the county fiscal court.
5. Monterey County, California – Uh oh, another battery fire in central California.