What happens when America, one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, starts weakening its climate rules? Over the next decade, the answer could be an additional 123 million metric tons of carbon emissions from American power plants. That is the estimate from the US Environmental Protection Agency after the Trump administration moved to remove limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas plants. For a planet already struggling with record heat and worsening extreme weather, the decision has raised serious concerns.
The move marks another major step in the Trump administration's rollback of US climate policies. It reverses the power plant carbon standards introduced under President Joe Biden in 2024 and could also make it harder for future administrations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector.
For the Trump administration, however, the argument is not about increasing pollution. It is about energy.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has accused previous administrations of waging a “war on coal” and says the new approach will help unleash American energy, create jobs and lower electricity prices. “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices,” Zeldin said.
The policy could also save power plant operators about $370 million in direct compliance costs over the coming years.
But the climate cost could be much larger.
The US electricity sector produces roughly one-quarter of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. Its influence is so large that if the US power sector were counted as a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world.
That makes the decision important far beyond American borders.
Carbon dioxide does not stop at a country's boundary. Once released, it accumulates in the atmosphere and contributes to a global rise in temperatures. The effects are already being felt through heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods.
Environmental groups have strongly condemned the move. The Sierra Club described it as “full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time.” Former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy warned that the decision could leave communities, children and future generations paying the price for increased pollution.
There is also a growing demand for electricity behind this debate.
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has created a new appetite for power as companies build energy-intensive data centres. More than two dozen natural gas plants were built in the US last year, according to Cleanview. Natural gas can produce fewer emissions than coal, but it is still a fossil fuel and a significant source of greenhouse gases.
Coal, meanwhile, has been losing ground for decades. It supplied more than half of US electricity in 1990. By 2025, that figure had fallen to around 17%. Since 2010, 330 coal plants have closed, while another 60 have announced plans to close by 2031.
The contrast with Biden's 2024 rules is striking. The EPA estimated that those standards could cut about 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases by 2047, prevent 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma attacks in 2035 alone, and deliver approximately $370 billion in net benefits.
Now, that direction has changed.
The decision is expected to face legal challenges, so its future remains uncertain. But one question is already difficult to ignore: at a time when the world is racing to reduce emissions, what does it mean when one of its largest emitters chooses to loosen the rules?
The climate will not wait for the courts, politicians or the next election to decide.
