Trump EPA Proposes Rollback Of Biden Power Plant Emissions Rules

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back Biden-era rules for air pollution from power plants.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday that the agency plans to eliminate the Biden administration’s limits on carbon dioxide from power plants, including existing coal plants and some new gas plants.

Zeldin also said EPA would repeal stricter limits on mercury and air toxics from power plants enacted under Biden and return to the previous Obama-era rules.

He said the changes would allow coal plants to stay in operation longer to support the growth in electricity demand, driven in part by AI and data centers.

“Rest assured, President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “We will use coal for power generation, to mine for critical minerals and to export to our allies.”

Coal has struggled to compete with cheaper, abundant natural gas and increasingly renewables such as wind and solar.

Zeldin said the rule revisions would be open to public comment and that the agency would try to finalize them this year.

The EPA revisions received praise from West Virginia elected officials.

Gov. Patrick Morrisey noted that EPA’s previous attempt to regulate carbon dioxide emissions was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case he argued as state attorney general.

“We kept fighting and ultimately won at the highest court in West Virginia v. EPA, a decisive ruling that reaffirmed what we had argued all along: major policy decisions like reshaping our energy grid must come from Congress, not from unelected federal bureaucrats,” Morrisey said in a statement.

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said she was “thrilled.”

“I have long opposed this rule and warned of the devastating economic impacts it would have in West Virginia, and the energy reliability concerns it would create across our country,” she said in a statement.

Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy for Appalachian Voices, had a different reaction. 

“This action by the EPA, paired with the broad cancellation of billions of dollars in federal grants meant to help people clean up pollution and congressional and agency efforts to skip and eliminate environmental review for new polluting projects, will undoubtedly make Americans less healthy and less safe,” she said in a statement.