EPA slashes Biden-era air pollution limits

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Friday it would revoke a set of Biden-era regulations limiting mercury and toxic air pollution, lauding it as an effort to “reverse Democrats' war on beautiful clean coal.”

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency was repealing the former president’s 2024 amendments to a policy commonly known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants.

The move, Zeldin said in a statement, would restore “existing, highly effective and robust” requirements in place prior to the Biden-era amendments, “which will ensure public health and the environment are protected without compromising America’s energy or economic prosperity.” 

He asserted the move would save taxpayers up to $670 million in the form of lower everyday living costs.

“The Biden-Harris administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy,” Zeldin said. “The Trump EPA knows that we can grow the economy, enhance baseload power and protect human health and the environment all at the same time. It is not a binary choice and never should have been.”

According to the EPA’s own regulatory impact analysis, the repeal would result in an increase of nonmercury hazardous air pollutant emissions by seven tons in 2028, five tons in 2030 and four tons in 2035. The agency further estimated an increase of 900-1,000 pounds of mercury emissions annually. 

It could not provide an estimated monetary benefit due to data limitations, while any estimated impacts on the energy market — including retail electricity prices, the average price of coal, coal production, the price of natural gas or natural gas use — were estimated as negligible between 2028 and 2035. 

Sierra Club Climate Policy Director Patrick Drupp slammed the decision in a statement, calling it “the complete opposition of making Americans healthy.”

“For over a decade, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards have protection Ameircans from mercury and other dangers emitted by coal plants, but now Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are recklessly attacking these protections so their coal buddies can make a few more bucks,” Drupp said.

Former President Joe Biden’s EPA created the new standards in May 2024 to modernize them for highly toxic pollutants that are emitted by coal-fired power plants.

The rule set higher limits on mercury emissions from plants that burn lignite coal and required plants to continuously monitor their arsenic, nickel and other toxic metal emissions.

Plants were required to begin implementing necessary technology by January 2025 and set a compliance deadline of July 2027 for the emission standards.

Trump first indicated the rollback in a March 12 press release, citing concerns about the compliance costs and burdens on the coal industry. At the same time, the EPA announced it was considering a 2-year compliance exemption that would suspend the standards until the EPA completed the rule-making process.

In an April 8 proclamation, Trump invoked a narrow provision in the Clean Energy Act meant to exempt plants from the emission standards violates the Clean Air Act.

In a June 11 statement announcing the proposed rule, Zeldin claimed the rollback would result in $1.2 billion in savings for the power sector over the next decade starting in 2028. 

The Biden-era rule, the EPA claimed, had caused “significant regulatory uncertainty” for coal plants in Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

A group of environmental groups led by the National Resource Defense Council sued the EPA on June 12 following Zeldin’s proposal, warning the move would impact 68 plants, nearly one-third of all coal-fired power plants in the nation. 

They further argued the move wrongfully exploits a “a narrow and never-before-used provision” that allows a president to exempt certain plants from air pollution standards when technology necessary to comply is “not available” and when an exemption is “in the national security interests” of the United States.

In August, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted a stay until March 3 based on the government’s representation that it would issue a final rule within six months. Friedman is likely to revive the case and begin briefing in the coming weeks. 

The rollback is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to reverse Biden’s efforts to address the rapidly developing climate crisis.

On Feb. 12, Zeldin announced the EPA had done away with the landmark endangerment finding, which concluded that carbon dioxide pollution endangers human health and upon which decades of climate regulations were based.

The EPA faces a similar lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit filed on Wednesday. 

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