Trump topples the last pillar of Biden’s climate agenda

The Environmental Protection Agency is scrapping the last federal rule limiting carbon emissions from power plants. The rule, finalized under Biden in 2024, gave coal-burning utilities a choice: retire their plants in the 2030s, or install equipment to capture nearly all the carbon dioxide from their smokestacks. Trump's EPA now plans to remove those requirements entirely, arguing the science on climate change is uncertain and that the change will lower power bills. Because the rule never actually took effect before being repealed, this mainly removes a future push toward cleaner power rather than reversing something already happening at your local plant.

Coal use in the U.S. has been falling for two decades anyway, mostly because cheap natural gas from fracking made gas plants more attractive than coal. But that decline may now slow. Rising electricity demand from data centers running AI has pushed some utilities to delay coal plant retirements that were previously planned. One example: a Mississippi coal plant originally set to close by 2028 will now likely run into the 2030s.

For homeowners, the direct effect isn't upgrades or rebates — those programs are separate from this rule. The bigger implication is public health and long-term power-sector emissions: the Biden rule was projected to prevent hundreds of thousands of asthma flare-ups and over a thousand premature deaths annually by 2035, benefits that are now unlikely to materialize on that timeline. Coal plants also emit mercury and particulate pollution beyond carbon dioxide, so slower plant closures generally mean more of that pollution regionally.