EPA Secures Historic Protections For Carbon Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it had secured sweeping new protections for carbon dioxide, ending decades of federal interference with the pollutant’s movement from American smokestacks into the atmosphere. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin repealed most Biden-era carbon limits for coal- and gas-fired power plants and proposed eliminating the remaining greenhouse-gas standards for the sector. The agency also moved to prevent future administrations from regulating power-plant carbon under the Clean Air Act, shielding emissions from the dangerous possibility that elections might affect environmental policy.

Officials unveiled the liberation effort at an energy meeting in Houston, where Zeldin said the rollback would save more than $300 billion. The estimate includes the economic value of allowing carbon to travel directly into the atmosphere rather than being detained indefinitely by capture equipment, efficiency requirements and other forms of administrative captivity. “For years, radical environmentalists locked beautiful American carbon inside regulations, where it could not create jobs, warm the planet or compete with China,” President Donald Trump said. “We are setting it free so every family can breathe a stronger, richer and much more patriotic atmosphere.”

Former President Joe Biden had required many power plants to reduce emissions or close, an extremist interpretation of the EPA’s mission based on the divisive theory that environmental protection should involve protecting the environment. The Trump administration adopted a more compassionate standard, reasoning that because U.S. power plants produce only part of the world’s climate pollution, regulating any of them would be unfair until every smokestack on Earth could be disciplined simultaneously. Critics said the repeal would worsen global warming, respiratory illness and premature deaths, but agency officials rejected those concerns as obsolete accounting practices that assign consequences to the industries producing them. Under the new framework, pollution becomes harmless once it crosses a state line, economically beneficial once it enters the atmosphere and legally irrelevant once enough other countries are also producing it. Carbon pollution is now America’s most protected natural resource.

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