EPA’s new power plant pollution rule has a big gaseous hole

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just finalized rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. But it still doesn’t crack down on the national fleet of gas-fired power plants. This is a huge omission considering that the US receives 43 percent of its electricity from gas, more than from any other energy source.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan says the agency is taking longer to strengthen rules for current gas-fired power plants. But waiting too long risks leaving the decision to a possible future Trump administration, which tried to gut environmental protections last time. Meanwhile, time is running out for the US to fulfill the climate commitments it established under the Paris Agreement. The Biden administration promised reduce its carbon pollution by half from 2005 levels by the end of the decade under that agreement.

“A piecemeal approach won’t get us there,” writes Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president of climate change at the World Wildlife Fund, in comments emailed to On the edge. “The Biden administration has a responsibility to set a clear direction on how fossil fuels will be phased out. They have taken comprehensive action before, and we expect comprehensive action now, not action hampered by loopholes.”

The EPA claims it is doing something about existing natural gas plants – that it is, in fact, “committed to rapidly proposing GHG emissions guidelines for these units” and plans to propose new rules. But for now, it’s just collecting information for the proposed rule in a “unregulated summary”, which the EPA website says “is not related to the development of a rule”. We’ll be speaking with EPA Administrator Regan later today about how the process might work.

“What we are doing with the situation with existing natural gas plants is a direct response…to both our industry stakeholders and our environmental stakeholders who have said we can do better. And we decided to accept this challenge,” Regan said at a press conference yesterday.

The agency has not said how long this process might take, but it could effectively leave the decision is up to voters in November. When former President Donald Trump was in office, his administration went backwards more than 100 environmental regulations. Trump replaced the Obama administration’s proposed rules on power plant pollution with his own weaker measures, which a federal court blocked before they could be implemented.

Even now, the EPA’s rules on power plants are likely to face challenges in court and of a divided Congress. The agency’s ability to regulate the energy sector has already been undermined by the Supreme Court. This decided in 2022 that the EPA cannot limit greenhouse gas emissions in a way that determines which energy sources the US uses. In other words, you cannot openly pressure utility companies to turn to renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy. The decision effectively led the EPA to rely on controversial carbon capture technologies in any policy to reduce emissions from power plants.

Under rules announced today by the EPA, newly built gas plants and existing coal plants will eventually have to “control 90 percent of their carbon pollution.” In this case, control actually means capturing CO2 emissions using technologies that eliminate greenhouse gases from smokestack emissions before they can be released into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture technology is loved by fossil fuel companies and despised by many environmental and health advocates – because instead of having to phase out fossil fuel power plants, utilities can maintain those plants open for longer while meeting climate objectives. This is a huge disappointment for communities who hoped that a transition to renewable energy would eliminate other pollutants such as soot and smog from power plants.

“We are talking about putting all our hopes and dreams for the future into experiments [carbon capture] technology,” says Maria Lopez-Nuñez, board member of the Climate Justice Alliance and deputy director of the Ironbound Community Corporation in Newark, New Jersey.

Lopez-Nuñez says he lives in a neighborhood with three power plants within a four-square-mile radius. When the Biden administration initially proposed stricter carbon emission standards for power plants last year, it included existing gas-fired power plants — but also relied on carbon capture to clean them up. That wouldn’t have eliminated other air pollutants from power plants that his community has to deal with, says Lopez-Nuñez.

She wants the EPA to consider the cumulative impact power plants have on residents when crafting new rules, and thinks it’s a worthwhile bet in the upcoming presidential election if the agency is serious about crafting a stronger rule.

“It’s better that they don’t mislead people with the delay, because we have the impression that the delay is to strengthen the rule, and not… just to delay until the elections. This is not a political game, you know, there are real lives at stake,” she says.

Costs are another big concern with carbon capture. The Department of Energy (DOE) has already lost hundreds of millions of dollars funding failed carbon capture projects, according to a 2021 report report by the Government Accountability Office. After spending $684 million on carbon capture projects at six coal plants, only one of them got off the ground – the others were unable to sustain themselves financially. The only project that managed to start operating later ended up closing in 2020 because it was also unable to sustain itself during the covid pandemic, but it came reopened in Texas last year.

Recognizing these challenges, EPA’s final rule also gives power plants more time to comply with pollution reduction measures. The plants have until 2032 to comply, two years later than the EPA initially proposed last year. The Biden administration has tried to reduce the costs of carbon capture expansion of tax credits for technologies in 2022. The hope is that it will be cheaper to move forward than it was when DOE-funded projects failed.

Coal-fired plants are dirtier than gas-fired plants, so they remain the energy sector’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. It expects its new rules to prevent 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon pollution by 2047, which is equivalent to eliminating almost an entire year of emissions from the energy sector. The EPA also tightened limits on mercury emissions, water pollution and coal ash from current power plants. Altogether, the measures generated some celebration from environmental groups.

“The new standards announced today will dramatically reduce climate pollution while ensuring millions of people have cleaner, safer air and water,” said Abigail Dillen, president of the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, in comments submitted by and email to On the edge. “Tackling pollution from existing gas-fired power plants is the essential next step.”