Power Plants Will Be Allowed To Pollute As Much As They Want Under New EPA Rules

The consequences of our fossil fuel addiction are no longer theoretical. They're here. We've just come out of the hottest August ever recorded in what will surely be the hottest summer on record, where European heatwaves caused tens of thousands of excess deaths over the last several months. Any sane president would be pushing the U.S. toward cleaner and more reliable energy, but we don't have a sane president, so instead, Reuters reports the Environmental Protection Agency plans to repeal pollution limits on coal and gas power plants.

This news comes months after Republicans effectively ended emissions regulations on vehicles in the U.S., announcing that their official position is that car pollution isn't actually bad for you. It doesn't exactly come as a complete surprise, either, since Trump's pollution-loving EPA administrator Lee Zeldin proposed ending Biden-era limits on the amount of carbon dioxide, mercury and other pollutants that power plants are allowed to dump into our air. 

"EPA is taking an important step, reclaiming sanity and sound policy, illustrating that we can both protect the environment and grow the economy," Zeldin said at the time.

Now, Reuters reports the EPA is close to finalizing its initial proposal to eliminate regulations and will soon introduce a new rule "repealing the federal finding that greenhouse gases from power ‌plants ⁠specifically pose a threat." That decision runs contrary to all the available evidence, but when your political party is so throughly bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry, suddenly things like "evidence" and "facts" don't matter nearly as much as ensuring billions of dollars in record profits for your oily benefactors. 

According to Bloomberg, power plants are the single largest industrial source of greenhouse gas pollution, writing, "If the US power sector were a country by itself, it would rank as the world's sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to a New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity analysis of 2022 emissions data." Unfortunately for all of us who have lungs, cleaning up those power plants has been easier said than done. 

Under President Obama, the EPA finalized a rule known as the Clean Power Plan that required current and future power plants to limit how much pollution they spew. The Republican-controlled Supreme Court later struck down that rule. And while we saw new rules under Biden, once Trump returned to the White House, Republicans got to work undoing as much progress as they could. Worrying about things like lung and heart conditions is for the poors, apparently. 

Environmental groups are understandably upset, and the new rules will almost definitely face legal challenges. "This is a transparent giveaway to fossil fuel polluters, and the courts should see it that way," Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute attorney Maggie Coulter told Bloomberg. However, with a large Republican majority on the Supreme Court, the groups that plan to sue face an uphill battle. 

The Associated Press reports that under Zeldin's "pollute as much as you want" plan, fossil fuel-fired power plants could save a collective $300 billion. And if the corporations stand to increase their profits, why would the Supreme Court care about our children or the future? That would just be silly.