Trump’s Pro–Global Warming Agenda Is About to Get Even Worse

It’s a great day for people who hate the idea of a livable planet. For everyone else, not so much. The Trump administration today plans to both rescind existing rules on climate pollution from power plants and undercut future administrations’ ability to regulate those emissions. These moves face court challenges. But if they go through, they would gut what’s left of U.S. climate policy and undermine efforts to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Both the Obama and Biden administrations used the Clean Air Act to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which drive climate change. Now Donald Trump, who has labeled climate change a “con job” and twice pulled out of international agreements meant to mitigate it, is reversing those efforts. One of his new rules would reportedly eliminate Biden-era regulations that required power plants that run on coal and natural gas to limit their carbon emissions. If that rule matches a version reporters obtained last year, it will argue that power plants don’t contribute significantly to pollution or climate change because they’re “ a small and decreasing part of global emissions ,” even though coal remains the worst-polluting fossil fuel. The second proposal would be even more far-reaching . It’s expected to claim that power plant emissions in general don’t meet the Clean Air Act’s standard for Environmental Protection Agency regulation.

The power industry is, behind transportation, the second-largest source of planet-warming emissions in the United States and the second-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Kneecapping the EPA’s ability to regulate the industry under the Clean Air Act would gut one of the main ways Democratic presidents have tried to minimize climate impacts and tie future Democratic presidents’ hands.

Earlier this year, Trump rescinded a long-standing EPA finding that greenhouse gases jeopardize human health. That determination, known as the “endangerment finding,” had been the basis of federal climate regulation for nearly two decades. Without it, the administration has effectively given itself carte blanche to go after all manner of climate regulations. Trump has lifted restrictions on vehicle tailpipe emissions, canceled billions for clean energy projects in blue states, and delayed efforts to eliminate chemicals that are hundreds or thousands of times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

Trump officials argue that climate rules burden the fossil fuel industry, hurt the economy, and increase what Americans pay for electricity. In truth, the EPA’s own assessments recently found that repealing power-plant pollution standards will do little to lower utility bills or save the coal industry, which has been in decline for decades. But it would be a major favor to the GOP’s fossil fuel benefactors, saving the industry billions.