EPA's Lee Zeldin repeals power plant emissions rules

The EPA's action undoes the 2024 Biden carbon standards for power plants, which aimed to require plants to either cut or use emissions technology to capture 90% of their climate pollution. The repeal arrives shortly after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2026 summer was the warmest in U.S. history, about 3 degrees Fahrenheit above average. The timing sharpens the contrast between the administration's contention that emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change and its critics' view that the rollback is a license to keep polluting.

According to Dan Romito, managing director at Opportune overseeing sustainability, the move is a "step back in order to take two steps forward" — a Band-Aid that lets coal fill the gap for three, four, maybe five years while the market incorporates geothermal and nuclear solutions. He said it relieves investor apprehension about new modernized plants. The administration frames the change as cutting red tape because the Clean Air Act does not specifically mention climate change, a position that invites the legal challenges the article calls inevitable.

The outcome hinges on those legal challenges and on whether congressional permitting reform, which appears unlikely to come to fruition this year, eventually expedites power projects. For data center and AI operators, the near-term question is whether the additional certainty actually gets projects off the starting line; for environmental and public health groups, the fight is likely to move to the courts. How much old coal and gas capacity stays online, and for how long, may ultimately be decided there rather than by the EPA.