EPA severely limits pollution from coal plants
The Biden administration on Thursday placed the final cornerstone of its plan to tackle climate change: a regulation that would force the nation’s coalfired power plants to virtually eliminate the planet-warming pollution that they release into the air or shut down.
The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency requires coal plants in the United States to reduce 90%of their greenhouse pollution by 2039, one year earlier than the agency had initially proposed. The compressed timeline was condemned by coal executives who said the new standards would be impossible to meet.
The EPA also imposed three additional regulations on coal-burning power plants, including stricter limits on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin linked to developmental damage in children, from plants that burn lignite coal, the lowest grade of coal. The rules also more tightly restrict the seepage of toxic ash from coal plants into water supplies and limit the discharge of wastewater from coal plants.
Taken together, the regulations could deliver a death blow in the United States to coal, the fuel that powered the country for much of the last century but has caused global environmental damage. When burned, coal emits more carbon dioxide than any other fuel source.
The new rules regarding power plants come weeks after the administration’s other major climate regulations to limit emissions from cars and large trucks in a way that is designed to speed the adoption of electric vehicles. Transportation and electric power are the two largest sources in the U.S. of the carbon pollution driving climate change.
Biden wants to cut that pollution by about 50% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, and to eliminate emissions from the power sector by 2035.
The U.S. coal industry has been on a precipitous decline for over a decade, as environmental regulations and a boom in natural gas, wind and solar power made it more expensive to burn coal, and power generation shifted toward those cheaper, cleaner sources of electricity. In 2023, coal-fired power plants generated 16.2% of the nation’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, down from a peak of 52% in 1990.