Trump administration poised to repeal carbon standards for coal, gas power plants

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to formally rescind carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants as soon as Sept 14, according to people familiar with the matter.US President Donald Trump administration’s latest major climate rollback is expected to come on the sidelines of a Group of 20 energy ministers’ meeting in Houston, Texas, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are not yet public.Earlier in 2026, the EPA rescinded similar climate standards for vehicles and the 2009 endangerment finding, a landmark ruling which held that greenhouse gases threaten human health.Under Trump, the EPA first proposed rolling back the power plant climate rules last summer.This week, the agency is finalising a piece of the initial proposal – scrapping mandates from former US president Joe Biden’s era that required existing and future US fossil fuel-fired power plants to deploy specific emissions-reduction technologies, according to the people.The emissions-reduction technologies under those mandates included carbon capture and storage, and were aimed at sharply cutting the power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.Agency officials also plan to propose a separate rule repealing the federal finding that greenhouse gases from power plants specifically pose a threat, effectively a separate endangerment finding for power plants under the Clean Air Act.Power plants are the US’ largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions. If the US power sector were a country by itself, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to a New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity analysis of 2022 emissions data.Under the Obama administration, the EPA finalised the Clean Power Plan, which required existing and future fossil fuel-fired plants to cut their climate pollution for the first time.The Supreme Court struck it down in 2022 and a separate court ruling struck down the first Trump administration’s replacement rule.The Biden EPA finalised its own rules in 2024, which effectively forced the nation’s current fleet of coal plants to capture most of its carbon emissions by 2039 or close. This is the rule now being repealed.The EPA did not respond to requests for comment outside business hours on Sept 13. BLOOMBERG