By Vijay Jayaraj

In April 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave America’s coal and gas plants an ultimatum: capture most of your carbon dioxide emissions or close. On September 14, the agency withdrew the order. The repeal corrects one of the most reckless regulatory actions of the past decade.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the decision at a G20 “energy abundance” meeting in Houston. He scrapped most of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards and proposed rescinding every remaining greenhouse gas standard for power plants.

The Government Accountability Office’s review of the repeal shows that EPA calculated savings of $95 billion to $160 billion. Utilities would have sunk that money into machinery never shown to be effective in the real world, and the cost would have landed on monthly electricity bills.

The purpose was obvious from the start: Set a bar plants could not clear and force them to go out of business. The Supreme Court had already rebuked the agency in West Virginia v. EPA for trying to redraw the nation’s fuel mix through the Clean Air Act. The Biden administration simply tried again by another route.

PJM, which runs the grid for 67 million people in 13 states and Washington, D.C., had warned that 40 gigawatts of generation could retire by 2030, with 25 gigawatts of that driven by policy. In addition, replacement capacity is arriving too slowly, according to the grid operator. The current administration’s EPA now acknowledges that the old standards required technology that was not adequately demonstrated.

Defenders of the old rule now cite $370 billion in climate and health benefits through 2047. But that number is highly suspect. Most of the health gains come from cutting soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, pollutants that separate EPA programs already regulate. Regulators borrowed those benefits to prop up a carbon rule that could not justify itself on carbon alone. If any of those pollutants need a tighter limit, EPA can write one directly. Counting the same benefit twice is fraudulent.

Unjustified Climate Angle
The climate half of the ledger fares worse. It depends on the so-called social cost of carbon, a figure generated by computer models that project damages decades ahead and had long leaned on worst-case emission scenarios that many climate researchers themselves now call implausible.

The rule’s champions rarely say how much warming the regulation would avoid because the honest figure is a sliver of a degree too small for any thermometer to register. According to a 2022 EPA estimate, power plants produce roughly a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which account for a shrinking share of the global total. China and India, meanwhile, keep approving coal plants to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Charging Americans $160 billion for a temperature effect no one can measure is green ideology’s virtue signaling billed to ratepayers.

The deeper error is treating carbon dioxide like soot. It is a trace gas that plants need to grow, and rising concentrations have coincided with record global harvests and satellite-observed greening across much of the planet. A regulator that classifies the molecule feeding the world’s crops as a danger to public welfare is disconnected from basic biology.

The Fallout

Twenty-one states led by New York have sued to stop the EPA repeal, and environmental groups have filed their own challenges. Courts will rule. But notice who is suing. Many plaintiff states already charge some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and New York residents watched their rates climb 14% in the past year. Those states remain free to impose their own climate policies on their own voters. What they want from the courts is permission for a federal agency to impose those costs on you, without any clear instruction from Congress.

Watch three things next. Will utilities use the relief to postpone planned coal retirements and keep gas units running? Will developers break ground on new gas plants faster now that a carbon-capture mandate no longer threatens a 30-year investment? And will your state utility commission pass the savings to you or let them disappear into corporate balance sheets?

For too long, regulators justified punishing mandates with scenarios of catastrophe based on the flawed outputs of computer models. The practice should end with the demise of the carbon rule. The next time a bureaucrat promises to save the planet, demand two numbers: the measurable effect of the rule, whether temperature or some other metric, and the name of the power plant that will keep your lights on.