EPA’s Unlawful Attack on Power Plant Standards
Environmental groups file comments opposing EPA’s proposal to abdicate its legal responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Major environmental groups submitted comments detailing the numerous legal and technical flaws in the Environmental Protection Agency’s “tectonic and unreasoned” proposal to abdicate its legal authority and responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The proposal is “fundamentally unlawful” and should be abandoned because it contravenes Supreme Court precedent and guts important clean air protections, the groups said in comments submitted to the agency.
Clean Air Task Force, Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law & Policy Center, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), Sierra Club, and Union of Concerned Scientists signed the comments.
The EPA “misinterprets the Clean Air Act, ignores scientific evidence, and entirely misunderstands its own duty as the agency responsible for protecting public health and the environment,” the comments say. “The EPA must withdraw the supplemental proposal in its entirety.”
A key part of the agency’s proposal is its contention that addressing the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., would be “futile,” because they are responsible for only a portion of the problem of climate change.
But EPA’s futility analysis “lacks any legal foundation or rational basis and is otherwise fundamentally flawed, arbitrary and capricious, inadequately explained, and unlawful,” the groups said.
The comments include new expert modeling showing that – even assuming the EPA’s own power-plant emissions projections – uncontrolled U.S. power-plant greenhouse gases would cause massive human health and welfare harms of $20.4 trillion by 2100.
For context, the entire U.S. GDP was $29.3 trillion in 2024.
The new modeling also shows that, under EPA’s own projections, U.S. power-plant carbon pollution will cause more than 100,000 childhood asthma cases, 22,000 hospital or emergency room visits, and 1.8 million lost school days by 2100. Using other assumptions, projected damages to health and welfare are even worse.
The comments submitted to EPA late yesterday were also endorsed by Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, and Friends of the Earth.