EPA moves to strip the last federal carbon limits from US power plants

The person who answers a customer's question about the carbon behind an inference bill usually works from one number: the emissions of the grid the racks sit on. The Environmental Protection Agency is now proposing to remove any remaining limits on what the plants feeding that grid may emit ^[2], on top of finalizing the repeal of the Biden-era requirements ^[1].

The finalized repeal accounts for nearly all of the claimed savings. The EPA says the finalized rule would save $310 billion ^[11], and that the additional proposed actions would shave off $370 million "in direct compliance costs" ^[12]. The ratio is about 840 to 1 ^[17]. The EPA describes the two in different terms, so they are not strictly comparable, but the piece now open for comment is the smaller number. It extends to power plants the rollback the administration applied to vehicles in February, when it overturned the endangerment finding ^[4] that recognized greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations" ^[5].

In its press release, the EPA argued that greenhouse gas pollution is "out of its scope to regulate." Those impacts are "global in nature, and any potential public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector," the agency said ^[6]. The power sector produces a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, surpassed only by transportation ^[3]. The US has produced more greenhouse gas pollution than any other country in history and remains a leading emitter after China ^[13].

Dominique Browning is director and cofounder of Moms Clean Air Force. "Failure to limit climate pollution means more children ending up in the emergency room with asthma attacks and heatstroke, more families struggling to rebuild homes after harrowing storms," she said in an emailed statement ^[8]. Sierra Club chief program officer Holly Bender said the group "will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country" ^[9].

The Verge describes the proposal as a major escalation of President Donald Trump's efforts to promote fossil fuels while making it easier to build out energy-hungry data centers ^[16]. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has prioritized making America "the AI capital of the world" by slashing environmental regulations for those data centers and the gas and coal plants behind them, the outlet reports ^[14]. Electricity has already gotten more expensive as US demand rises for the first time in over a decade, with data centers, factories and electric vehicles plugging in ^[15]. The Verge's account covers the plants and their regulator; what the companies buying that power have to report is a separate question.

A carbon number attached to a compute product rests either on a contract with named generation that the buyer signed or on a grid average set by fuel decisions someone else makes. Most vendor questionnaires are answered with the average. A repeal only touches the average.

So a team carrying a carbon commitment inside a customer contract has one test available before the next renewal: recompute it with the assumption that federal limits tighten taken out, and see whether the commitment still has a path. If the number does not move, it was never resting on the rule. If it moves, the difference has to be bought as contracted supply, a line item somebody has to approve while the proposal sits in a 45-day comment window and heads for court ^[10].