The Environmental Protection Agency finalized the repeal of a Biden-era regulation limiting greenhouse gasses from power plants, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Monday. 

The repeal eliminates the majority of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas emissions restrictions for U.S. power plants, and the EPA has proposed rescinding the last remaining greenhouse gas standards for the U.S. power sector. 

The actions follow the Trump administration’s ongoing departure from the Biden and Obama administrations’ climate policies. Coal, natural gas and oil-fired power plants account for approximately one-fourth of greenhouse gas emissions, and climate groups are upset with the decision. 

On Thursday, a coalition of climate and public health groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from repealing the rule in action filed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. 

Lawfare, as expected

“The Clean Air Act and Supreme Court precedent demand that the EPA address climate pollution from the largest industrial source in the nation. The EPA’s legal reasoning is fatally flawed, so we are going to court,” Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at NRDC, said in a statement. 

Besides severely degrading the reliability of the grid and causing frequent blackouts, experts warned, the rule would drive up the cost of electricity. It also relied on promises of carbon capture technology that engineers reviewing the draft of the proposed rule warned were infeasible. It also would have had very little impact on reducing global temperatures. 

While climate groups may not want to give up the emissions reductions the regulations would have produced, the rule was likely to fail on implementation. 

Clean Power Plan 2.0

The rule, which critics dubbed the Clean Power Plan 2.0, would have required existing coal plants that wanted to run past 2039, and new natural gas plants, to capture 90% of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2032 using carbon capture and sequestration technologies. 

At the time the rule was proposed, the technology was operating at a commercial scale at only one U.S. power plant. If the plants failed to meet those standards, they had to shut down by 2039. If the rule had survived, the U.S. power grid would have been entirely reliant on wind, solar and batteries. 

Absent development and construction of new nuclear reactors, the only baseload generators that could back up intermittent wind and solar under the rule would have been hydroelectric, and according to experts such as Substack's "Energy Bad Boys", batteries remain cost-prohibitive to address the problem. 

The push to electrify transportation and home heating under the Biden administration was adding loads to the grid that would have struggled under the rules, but now that data centers are pushing demand for electricity to new record highs, the repeal has some electricity suppliers breathing a sigh of relief. 

“We appreciate the administration’s action today to roll back key portions of the Biden-era power plant greenhouse gas rule, which is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson said in a statement. 

Shortly after the rules were publicized in the spring of 2024, energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling with Always On Energy Research analyzed the impact of the rules on the 5.2 million people served by the Southwest Power Pool, which covers much of the Great Plains. 

The researchers found that the provider’s customers could experience blackouts during periods of peak demand, which includes heat waves and cold snaps.  

The methodology the EPA used in the course of its regulatory impact analysis, Orr and Rolling found, didn’t adequately assess the impact of weather-dependent generation sources like wind and solar. It also didn’t factor in load growth from data centers or adoption of electric vehicles, which at the time were being federally mandated. 

This "may be the most irresponsible assumption in an energy model we have ever seen," the analysts wrote. 

Carbon capture promises

A central piece of Biden’s power-plant rule was fitting natural gas and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture technology. 

While the EPA has insisted the technology is “well proven,” a brief by the Louisiana Public Service Commission — which was filed in support of a petition asking the Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling that tossed a lawsuit against the rule — showed the agency’s modeling didn’t reflect such confidence in the technology. 

“The data shows that EPA's conclusions with regard to achievability and cost were drawn based on projections that no significant combined cycle generation will ever be added with carbon capture, transportation, and sequestration infrastructure. The same is true of coal capacity with CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration]," the LPSC wrote. 

Investigations by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability discovered that in comments on the draft of the rule, engineers also expressed grave doubts about the feasibility of carbon capture. 

Government Oversight and Accountability (GAO), a watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April 2025 seeking comments from engineers on the draft, which revealed that the engineers pointed out serious deficiencies in a carbon-capture demonstration project that was the basis for the EPA’s claims the technology was “well proven.” 

Critics cheer repeal, climate advocates are furious

Despite all the questions surrounding the feasibility of the rule, climate advocates are furious with the repeal, claiming it will spell doom for the country. 

“As millions of Americans suffer through more extreme heat, wildfires, and torrential storms, the Trump administration is denying what we know to be true: climate pollution is harming our health, welfare, and economy,” Jill Tauber, vice president for climate and energy at Earthjustice, said in a statement. 

Opponents of the rule, however, argue the EPA made the right decision. Brent Bennett, policy director for Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Institute said in a statement that it would have had little impact on global temperatures. 

"Our analysis showed that U.S. power sector emissions would move global temperatures by just 0.015°C, a change indistinguishable from measurement noise. You cannot claim 'significant contribution' when the signal disappears into the uncertainty of the data itself. Today, sound science prevailed over a decade of regulatory overreach,” Bennett said. 

Linnea Lueken, senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, said in a statement that the rule, like many regulations that aim to reduce greenhouse gases at any cost, are undermining affordability for all Americans. 

“Everything runs on energy. It’s not even just about the cost of your household electric bill, but everything that you interact with on a daily basis. This represents a massive victory for energy and climate realists who have fought this unscientific overreach for decades,” Lueken said. 

The repeal now heads into the courts, which will decide if America’s coal and natural gas generators will continue to power the grid.