By Joshua Arnold
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday announced the final repeal of a Biden-era regulation to cripple coal- and gas-powered power plants. At the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial in Houston, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin celebrated an end to the “war on coal” and a $300 billion down payment on an effort to “unleash” American energy.
In April 2024, the EPA under President Biden finalized rules that would require many coal- and natural gas-powered plants to eliminate 90% of their carbon dioxide emission by 2032. The rule applied to all new power plants and any existing power plants that planned to operate after 2039, which were running more than 40% of the time.
The regulation posed an onerous threat to American energy production because of basic chemistry. The combustion reaction (colloquially known as fire) produces energy by combining hydrocarbon fuels (such as coal, oil, natural gas, wood, sugars metabolized in a human cell, or anything comprised of hydrogen and carbon) with oxygen molecules from the surrounding air (or bloodstream, in the case of human cells, which is why humans need to breathe). Combustion produces two harmless substances: water (combined hydrogen and oxygen) and carbon dioxide (combined carbon and oxygen).
However, with the 2024 rule, Biden’s EPA had declared carbon dioxide, a primary product of combustion, to be a dangerous pollutant to be stored as discreetly as spent nuclear fuel rods. This is most feasibly accomplished by capturing the carbon dioxide as it is released and pumping it into vast underground chambers.
One can immediately see the glaring problem in this system. Power plants would hereby need gigantic, underground caverns to store vast measures of air — a precaution as expensive as it is pointless. Next, would they force humans to exhale into an underground tank in order to breathe?
The Biden administration estimated that the regulations would cost energy companies $19 billion over two decades to comply. However, the new EPA rule criticized its own past estimates as a best-case scenario that failed to account for power plants that varied in capacity, or for the possibility that higher operating costs might force those power plants to operate a smaller percentage of the time. The EPA now estimates that repealing the regulations will save energy companies $310 billion over two decades. Even if that is a high estimate, it shows just how low the previous estimate was.
To remain solvent, energy companies must pass on any cost increases to consumers in the form of higher energy prices.
“America should be producing more affordable, reliable energy,” insisted American Energy Institute founder and CEO Jason Isaac, “not forcing power plants and taxpayers to spend billions capturing and burying CO?.”
The Trump administration shares this view, with President Donald Trump calling climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” This perspective has informed a fundamental policy shift from one of punishing energy producers to allowing utilities to make their own decisions about what plants to keep in operation.
The EPA’s policy shift follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), which “held that the major questions doctrine barred EPA from misusing the Clean Air Act to manipulate Americans’ energy choices and shift the balance of the nation’s electrical fuel mix,” the agency said.
In effect, the Trump administration is taking the position that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. This is a fairly easy argument to make, at least under the normal definition of “pollutant.”
Fossil fuel energy production has long been associated with harmful forms of pollution, such as smog and acid rain. But, again, the answer relies on chemistry. These forms of pollution are the effect of impurities in the hydrocarbon fuel from compounds containing sulfur and nitrogen, which produce harmful sulfates and nitrates when burned. The only pollutant not caused by impurities in the fuel is carbon monoxide (“one oxygen,” as opposed to carbon dioxide, “two oxygens”), which results from combustion without enough oxygen.
But none of those pollutants are at issue here. The debate is over whether carbon dioxide — the substance humans breathe out and plants use for photosynthesis — is like enough to other pollutants to justify agency regulation without explicit Congressional authorization. The Trump administration’s position on this question is a definitive “no.”
The climate scolds will counter that carbon dioxide’s harmful effects are not local but global, as its properties as a greenhouse gas contribute to global warming. But even if there were a provable causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature change, coal and gas-fired plants “are a small and decreasing part of global emissions,” the EPA argued. “The targeted emissions are global in nature, and any potential public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector.”
In addition, even studies that assume global warming do not always conclude with the doomsday forecasts of the climate cult. For instance, in a recent analysis of emergency room visits for Medicare recipients, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that global warming may actually save lives. Between 2030 and 2075, they estimated that, because of global warming, “ED [emergency department] visits would increase by 18 million, ED spending would decrease by $55 billion, and mortality would be reduced by 2.5 million.”
That’s not a typo. The CBO, no Tea Party bastion, found that 2.5 million old people would survive because of global warming. Their reasoning is straightforward: hotter days (85 degrees or more) cause more emergency room visits in cold climates (like Boston), while colder days (25 degrees or less) cause more emergency room visits in warm climates (like Dallas) — because of what people are prepared to handle. If the climate becomes hotter over time, people will adapt. But here’s the clincher: emergency room visits brought on by cold are more lethal and costly than those brought on by heat, so a warming climate would actually help people live longer.
Such results do not appear every day, but it serves to highlight the point that the effects of climate policy are far more complex than left-wing propaganda pretends.
The Trump administration is determined not to heed the scolds, so they have gone forward with a plan to “unleash” American energy production again. In April of this year, the EPA took a preliminary step toward deregulation with two technical revisions it predicted would save energy companies $2.5 billion over 15 years. Now, after nixing the $310 billion worth of carbon dioxide emissions rules, Administrator Zeldin has proposed more deregulation that would save energy companies an additional $370 million — savings which they could pass on to consumers in the form of lower rates.
If the year is getting warmer for reasons beyond our control, we might as well make air conditioning affordable for everyone.
This article originally appeared here.
