When government agencies feel completely unrestrained by the theoretical confines of reality, things get weird in a hurry. On Wednesday, according to reporting to Politico and other outlets, the Environmental Protection Agency will announce a rollback of basically any emissions limits on power plants. In support of this move, administrator Lee Zeldin and his co-zealots will make a nakedly false claim: that the US power sector does not meaningfully contribute to climate change on a global scale.
The announcement will apparently made during an event at 2 pm on Wednesday, and will surely carry the sort of sweaty zeal that accompanies any Zeldin deregulatory celebration. Along with greenhouse gas emissions rules, EPA will also roll back rules about mercury and other hazardous pollutants, continuing the agency’s effort to make its name and actions as perpendicular to each other as possible.
The justification for this complete abdication of climate action in the power sector is, again, utter bullshit. Power plants account for around a quarter of all US emissions, and the US remains the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. A report out last month from experts at NYU’s Center for Policy Integrity put some more numbers on it: if the US’s power plants were a country, it would rank sixth on that emissions list. From 1990 to 2022, those power plants account for five percent of all global emissions, a bigger chunk of the pie than Japan, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, or Australia. There’s simply no world in which the argument holds up; it is yet another up-is-down, black-is-white, don’t-believe-your-own-eyes claim, offered up without a hint of shame in service of a few rich fossil fuel executives.
The co-argument to the blatant lie here is always that it costs too much to fix anything, but that too is tripe. Per the EPA’s own accounting back when it actually did the work it is supposed to in the halcyon days of, uh, 2024, limiting emissions from power plants carries a net benefit of almost $20 billion per year, thanks to $14 billion in climate benefits, $6.3 billion in health benefits from reduced pollution, and less than $1 billion in compliance costs. It’s just that the benefits go to the wrong people (us), so they don’t count.
The rollback proposals will surely be challenged in court, for whatever that’s worth. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s insistence that climate change is either not happening or not worth addressing is, of course, government-wide. Also on Wednesday, the Guardian reported that NOAA’s primary climate website, Climate.gov, will likely be shut down, after basically all of its staff was fired at the end of May. And why not, really — who needs such frivolities, when the government has learned to construct its own realities.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
