The Biden administration is poised to unveil its most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the nation’s thousands of power plants — an effort that’s certain to bring a legal and political attack from conservatives but may disappoint some supporters of the president’s climate agenda.
Opponents are eager to pounce. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican who led a Supreme Court fight last year that constrained EPA’s ability to tackle carbon emissions at power plants, last week vowed: “We’ll be ready.”EPA Administrator Michael Regan testifies on Capitol Hill in March. His agency is taking steps to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation and power sectors.
The grid has already shed more than a third of its greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, mainly thanks to the fracking boom that helped cheap natural gas gobble market share from coal. dinner last weekend. “He needs to step up to the plate and stop extraction on federal lands and stop approving new projects.”A man on a bike rides past a power plant in Brooklyn, N.Y. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The template tracks roughly with what influential green groups like Evergreen Action, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Clean Air Task Force have advocated. In the 1990s, EPA set standards for acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide that could be achieved by installing devices known as scrubbers on power plants, Duffy noted. And at the time, only three units were using them, and they were only available from one vendor. That rule held up in court.The Supreme Court hampered the Biden administration's ability to regulate power plants last year.
The Biden administration appears to have heeded that message by focusing its rule on carbon reductions at individual plants, Rushlow said — even if the limits it’s proposing are aggressive. But the rule may still be in legal jeopardy if the justices don’t agree with EPA’s reasons for selecting a given technology.
If it succeeds, the upcoming EPA rule would transform the U.S. economy by accelerating the dwindling of coal as a major power source. But it faces legal and political challenges.