Lee Zeldin signed two things on Monday at a G20 energy summit in Houston, and only one of them made the headlines.
The one that did repeals a Biden-era rule whose first compliance deadline was still six years away. The one that did not is a proposal to erase the legal finding underneath it, which is the document that decides whether any future administration can regulate carbon from power plants at all.
Nearly every story ran EPA’s own number, $310 billion in claimed savings, alongside the death of the 2024 carbon capture mandate. Very few separated the final action from the proposal attached to it, and that is the part worth understanding, because repealing a rule is ordinary politics that the next president can reverse, while stripping the statutory finding that authorizes the rule is an attempt to make the reversal require an act of Congress. The first is a policy change. The second is a lock on the door.
Two Documents, One Announcement
EPA’s own rulemaking page lays the pair out plainly:
- Final. A partial repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for fossil-fuel-fired electric generating units, signed September 14, which lifts the 2024 requirement that existing coal plants and new baseload gas plants cut carbon dioxide by roughly 90 percent.
- Proposed. A rescission of the greenhouse gas findings for fossil-fuel-fired power plants, plus repeal of the remaining power plant greenhouse gas regulations under section 111 of the Clean Air Act. That one is not final. It is a proposal, and EPA has not yet posted a date for the public hearing, telling readers only that it “will post updated information here soon.”
Zeldin called the package the largest deregulatory action for the American power sector in the country’s history, and said the agency had determined the Biden-era standards exceeded EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. Power plants are the second-largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions after transportation, at about 24 percent of the total, so the sector genuinely is the ballgame. Which makes the fine print more important, not less.
The Rule That Died Had Not Started Working Yet
The 2024 standards required existing coal units operating beyond 2039 and new baseload gas turbines to meet a limit equivalent to capturing 90 percent of their carbon, with compliance dates extending to January 2032 and exemptions for coal units that agreed to shut down by then. Two dozen states, eight industry groups, four power companies and three labor unions went to court immediately, and when they asked for an emergency halt they lost. The D.C. Circuit refused to stay the standards, finding that the petitioners had not met the requirements for a stay while the case was under review.
That history matters for reading Monday correctly. Almost nothing physically changes at an American power plant this month because of the repeal, since almost nothing was required of them yet. NPR reported the repeal as the removal of pollution limits, and that is accurate, but the limits being removed were future-dated commitments that most of the industry had already litigated into uncertainty. The practical effect of the final action is to settle the litigation in the industry’s favor. The practical effect of the proposal is to make the argument unavailable to anyone else, forever, without new legislation.
The Findings Are the Actual Fight
This administration has run this play before, and it is worth remembering how recently. In February, EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, the determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, which was the predicate for climate rules on cars, trucks, power plants and oil and gas facilities alike. We covered it at the time as the biggest single attack on US climate regulation on record. Two dozen states and ten cities sued within weeks, with New York Attorney General Letitia James among those asking a court to throw the rescission out. That case is still pending.
Monday’s proposal is the stationary-source version of the same move, aimed at the section 111 findings specifically. Strip those, and a future EPA cannot simply reissue a power plant carbon rule. It has to rebuild the factual and legal record from the ground up, and then defend the rebuild in front of courts that will be asked why the finding kept flipping. That is the design. NBC News noted that Zeldin has promised to revisit other policies resting on the same foundation, including methane rules, which tells you this is a sequence and not a one-off.
Where We Land on This
The $310 billion figure is a real estimate of one thing: compliance costs that utilities will not now pay. It is not a measure of what the country gets or loses, because the health and climate damages the 2024 rule was projected to avoid sit on the other side of a ledger EPA is simultaneously proposing to make legally irrelevant. Claiming a savings number while working to erase the finding that would let anyone count the cost is not a neutral accounting decision, and Zeldin should be asked about it in exactly those terms.
Our position is straightforward. An administration is entitled to repeal a rule it thinks overreaches, and if the 2024 standards really did exceed EPA’s authority, the courts were already the place to establish that. Going after the section 111 findings is something else: an effort to remove a question from democratic reach because you expect to lose it later. Senate Democrats spent the week criticizing the repeal, with Senator Maria Cantwell calling it a step in the wrong direction. The repeal is mostly done. The proposal is the one still open to comment, and it is where the pressure belongs.
Watch for two things: the hearing date EPA has not yet set, and whether the same coalition that sued over the endangerment finding treats this proposal as a separate front or an extension of the case already in front of a judge. The answer to the second question will say a lot about how permanent Monday actually was.