EPA Proposes Major Relief for American Power Generation

Significant Cost Savings on the Horizon

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced it is repealing two devastating regulations that were going to shut down reliable generation across the country, and Life:Powered is working overtime to help make sure these regulations never come back.

First, the EPA is planning to repeal the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards that would have required carbon capture for all new gas power plants and existing coal power plants after 2032. Second, it is repealing amendments the Biden made to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that would have shut down numerous coal plants across the country, all for negligible environmental benefits.

Supporting American Energy Security

These proposals align with broader goals of ensuring reliable, affordable electricity generation. As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stated: "Affordable, reliable electricity is key to the American dream and a natural byproduct of national energy dominance."

Coal and natural gas power plants provide essential baseload power needed to meet quickly growing electricity demand for manufacturing and emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The Science Behind the Decisions

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, led by Policy Director Dr. Brent Bennett, provided comments containing compelling scientific support for these proposals as well as options for the proposals to be improved. The EPA is correct in its assertion that GHG emissions from power plants are not “significantly contributing” to endangering the public health, which is the standard required in the Clean Air Act to regulate those emissions. TPPF’s research shows why this is the case:

• Eliminating all U.S. power sector CO₂ emissions by 2030 would reduce the increase in mean worldwide surface temperature in 2050 by only 0.015°C

• This impact is nearly an order of magnitude below the ±0.1°C average uncertainty in worldwide surface temperature measurements

• As Dr. Bennett notes in the TPPF comments: "the impact of U.S. power plant CO₂ emissions on global temperatures cannot even be reliably measured"

The EPA Needs More Scientific Rigor in its Cost-Benefit Analyses

One area where both proposals could be improved substantially is in the cost-benefit analyses. By simply reversing the costs and benefits calculated by the Biden EPA, the proposed rules vastly understate the benefits of reliable generation and overstate the health impacts of emissions in areas where air pollution is already at very safe levels.

Here is just one example of how outrageous the EPA’s estimates of health impacts are. Consider that if the EPA’s estimate for the cost particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions under these two rules were applied to all such emissions across the country, then the EPA would be attributing 382,500 premature deaths, at a cost of roughly $3.9 trillion, every year to PM2.5 emissions! It’s as if the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting the U.S. every year, and yet we were completely ignoring it.

Of course, as TPPF’s research has demonstrated many times over the years, the reality is that these impacts are almost entirely fictional. Just as the Trump EPA has abandoned the use of the social cost of carbon, it should abandon the calculation of phantom health impacts until it develops a more rigorous method for calculating those costs and subjects that method to peer-review and appropriate rulemaking processes.

Looking Forward

The proposals represent a science-based approach to regulation that considers both environmental protection and economic impacts. The TPPF analysis demonstrates that the only empirically detectable impact of greenhouse gas emissions to date has arguably resulted in a net benefit for public health, as deaths from extreme cold are declining faster than deaths from extreme heat are rising.

Emissions of real pollution (not GHGs) have fallen nearly 80% since the 1970s and are now at very safe levels across almost the entire country. It would be disastrous to attempt to regulate emissions down to zero, as the Obama and Biden EPAs were trending toward. Kudos to the Trump-EPA for adhering to reality instead of ideological fantasies and restoring sound science and economics to the regulatory process.