Washington • The United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, the Trump administration announced Monday.
The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency completed the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston. In a statement, he accused the Obama and Biden administrations of waging a “war on coal” that forced many coal plants to close prematurely.
The EPA minimized the impact of greenhouse gases from U.S. power plants, saying they “have no material impact on global climate change. In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.”
Environmentalists and energy experts strongly disputed these assertions. They noted that if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.
“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The EPA, he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”
President Donald Trump has derided climate change as a “hoax,” and in his second term, the EPA has systematically dismantled policies aimed at slowing global warming that have been criticized as costly by oil, gas and coal companies.
Under the plan announced Monday, power plants would still be subject to some limits on mercury, arsenic and other contaminants, though the EPA has already loosened restrictions on how much mercury they can emit.
Democratic-led states and environmental groups have said they intend to challenge the EPA’s plan in court.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.