The Biden administration’s climate crusade reached a crescendo Thursday, with the Environmental Protection Agency finishing four rules that could all but eliminate coal plants by the 2030s.
The new rules crack down on pollution from fossil fuel power plants, with new standards for coal ash, wastewater, mercury emissions and carbon dioxide. The carbon standard could transform the power sector, requiring utilities to either make major investments in coal plants to limit planet-warming pollution, or abandon coal altogether in favor of cleaner energy sources. Under the framework, all existing coal plants will need to install carbon capture and storage by 2032 if they plan to remain operating past 2039. Future natural gas plants that run frequently will have to do the same. EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters that the rules give utilities, regulators and states clarity on the clean energy transition — and ample time to plan retirements and avoid electricity disruptions, Jean Chemnick writes. “We are ensuring that the power sector has the information needed to prepare for the future with confidence, enabling strong investment and planning decisions,” Regan said on Wednesday. Here comes the counterattack But Republican lawmakers and critics in the power industry are already announcing legal and political attacks, Jean writes with Robin Bravender. The “barrage of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said she’ll use the Congressional Review Act to try to kill the rules, writes Emma Dumain. That 1996 law allows Congress to rescind a rule with a simple majority — but it would require a two-thirds majority of both chambers to override a veto from Biden. As with the Obama administration’s attempt to tackle the power sector’s climate pollution nearly a decade ago, the fate of EPA’s new rules may ultimately rest with the Supreme Court. EPA created its power plant pollution rule using its authority under the Clean Air Act. But in recent years, conservative groups have persuaded the Supreme Court to whittle away federal agencies’ powers — including through a newly adopted “major questions” doctrine. The doctrine — which the high court used to strike down the Obama rule two years ago — says federal agencies must have express permission from Congress to handle especially politically and economically significant issues. How significant is still a mystery. What the rules leave out The rules issued Thursday omit one big pollution source: existing natural gas plants. Gas is on the verge of overtaking coal as the power sector's largest source of carbon pollution this year. EPA plans to pursue a second rulemaking targeting those plants in 2025. But if former President Donald Trump wins the White House in November, he would most likely reverse course. Still, environmental groups emphasized on Thursday that EPA’s new standards would make a big dent. “Burning coal and oil produces a long list of dangerous air pollutants, including carcinogenic metals as well as other emissions that react to form particulate matter,” said American Lung Association CEO Harold Wimmer in a news release. “The new standards will reduce these dangerous emissions.”
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