Inside the EPA decision to limit two major climate regulations

President Biden’s climate ambitions are clashing with political and legal realities, forcing his administration to recalibrate two of its most important tools to reduce planet-warming emissions.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would delay a regulation requiring gas-fired power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, likely until after the November election. The agency is also expected to slow the pace at which automakers must comply with a separate regulation designed to sharply limit tailpipe emissions.

Michael S. Regan, the EPA’s administrator, said Friday that changes to the two key regulations would not jeopardize the administration’s ability to meet its goal of roughly halving U.S. emissions by 2030. in line with a global commitment to avert the worst effects of a warming planet.

“We are well on our way to achieving the president’s goals,” Mr. Regan said in a telephone interview from Texas. “I am confident that the choices we make are smart choices that will continue to curb climate pollution.”

But experts said the Biden administration is making significant concessions in the face of industry opposition and unease among the American public over the pace of the transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy, as well as the threat of legal challenges in conservative courts.

“There are two key factors: the Supreme Court and the elections,” said Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. and a former Obama White House official. “Both require some adjustments,” she says. “You need to make sure these final rules are legally defensible, and you need to make sure you’ve done enough for stakeholders to have support for the rules.”

Together, cars and electric energy generate more than half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That makes the rules designed to curb pollution from these sources the most important tools the EPA can use to address climate change.

In May, the EPA unveiled what would have been a groundbreaking plan to curb power plant emissions. It called for sharp emissions cuts from plants that burn coal or gas, which together produce most of the electricity in the United States. To comply, large gas-fired power plants would have to capture or eliminate at least 90 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. Coal-fired power stations should meet these requirements by 2030.

Almost immediately the pressure on the gas was intense.

The utility industry argued that technology to suck carbon emissions from the atmosphere is expensive and logistically challenging, and that the EPA’s timelines were unrealistic. Swing state Democrats said they were concerned the plan would result in higher electricity bills for voters and cause power outages.

Some environmental leaders said they were concerned that regulating large gas plants would increase pollution at smaller facilities known as “peaker plants,” which pollute heavily and are often located in poorer or minority communities.

On Thursday, the EPA said the final version of the regulation would apply only to existing coal-fired power plants and future gas-fired power plants, and not to gas-fired plants currently in operation. The agency said it would write a separate regulation to reduce emissions from gas-fired power plants currently in operation, a delay that will extend at least until after the November election.

Mr Regan said on Friday that his decision was based solely on concerns that the original rule could harm marginalized communities. He said the message from those communities was: “don’t pursue climate goals at our expense.”

“The way we see it, we have actually strengthened our climate approach to power plants,” Mr Regan said. “We are absolutely moving forward with some of the strongest regulations that existing coal and new natural gas will face.”

But several people familiar with the discussions within the EPA said the agency initially had no intention of regulating gas-fired power plants and agreed to do so under pressure from environmental groups and climate experts within the White House. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

In recent months, some within the agency have been concerned that a regulation regulating existing gas-fired power plants could be successfully challenged in court, these people said. Officials worried they didn’t have enough evidence that power plants could effectively limit their pollution by using cleaner fuels or installing new technology that captures carbon dioxide before it leaves the smokestack.

Carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the world.

Some industry lobbyists described the shift as a case of the Biden administration’s ideals colliding with reality. “They propose too much to appease activists, but when they have to make the rules, reality draws them back in,” said Frank Maisano, senior director at law firm Bracewell, which represents energy industry clients.

Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University, said the Biden administration’s EPA is focused on ensuring the rules are “as tight as possible” because they are sure to face legal challenges that could be heard in unfriendly courts treated.

The change in strategy has divided activists. Frank Sturges, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, said he was disappointed in the EPA’s decision, noting that gas plants produce more than 40 percent of electricity emissions. “We are losing time in the fight against climate change by delaying regulation of a significant portion of energy sector emissions,” Mr Sturges said.

David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, defended the EPA, saying the agency would still achieve “unprecedented greenhouse gas reductions” with both the auto and power plant rules that would ultimately be easier to defend in the future. court.

“If you can get a rule that benefits 90 percent or more of the proposal, and has more proponents and fewer opponents, that’s a path to a more legally sustainable rule,” he said.