Joe Biden's EPA gave America's coal plants a 2032 deadline – meet an impossible carbon standard or go dark forever.
EPA head Lee Zeldin just made them pay for that lie.
What he announced in Houston is the one move Biden's entire climate machine was built to prevent.
Trump EPA Kills Biden Power Plant Rules in the Largest Deregulation in US History
The Trump EPA is finalizing the permanent repeal of every federal greenhouse gas regulation on American power plants – and the agency is calling it the largest power sector deregulatory action in U.S. history.
Biden's "Clean Power Plan 2.0" – the rules that were forcing coal plants to shut down and making new gas plants prohibitively expensive to build – is finished.
The EPA's own data puts the savings at $310 billion.
That's not spread over a century. That's from wiping out one set of regulations Biden finalized in 2024.
A companion action eliminates every remaining greenhouse gas rule across the power sector, saving companies another $370 million in direct compliance costs and pushing electricity bills lower for homes and businesses nationwide.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin made the announcement at the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
"The Trump administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on," Zeldin said.
How Biden Clean Power Plan 2.0 Was Forcing Coal Plants to Shut Down
Biden's EPA finalized the power plant rules in 2024 and sold them as a climate breakthrough.
The reality was a slow-motion shutdown of American electricity.
Coal plants had to capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2032 or close. New gas plants faced the same impossible mandate.
The technology required – carbon capture at industrial scale – doesn't exist in America. It has never been deployed successfully at that level. Biden's entire compliance framework was built on technology that existed only in his administration's press releases.
Four of the nation's grid operators – the ones actually responsible for keeping the lights on for more than 150 million Americans – warned that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under Biden's plan.
The Edison Electric Institute and 23 states sued.
Meanwhile, industrial electricity rates in Ohio jumped 30 percent in a single year. Americans paid the highest power bills in U.S. history.
Biden called it progress.
Aaron Szabo, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, called it what it was: "Energy costs are a regressive form of taxation. The people who are hurt most by rising energy costs are the poorest in the country."
Obama Biden and the Supreme Court the Long War to Shut Down American Coal Plants
This isn't new. Obama launched the original Clean Power Plan in 2015 to force coal out of existence.
The Supreme Court stayed it immediately.
In 2022, the court struck it down entirely in West Virginia v. EPA, ruling the EPA had overstepped its statutory authority.
Biden ignored the ruling and launched Clean Power Plan 2.0 two years later.
Now the Trump EPA isn't just repealing Biden's rules. It's asserting that the agency never had the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in the first place.
The EPA's position is direct: targeted emissions are global in nature, and any alleged harms are too "uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted" to justify regulating American power plants under the Clean Air Act.
That's not just deregulation. That's closing the door permanently – and taking the key.
Gas plants generate 40 percent of American electricity. Coal generates another 17 percent. Together, they keep the grid stable when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Biden was shutting both down simultaneously, with no replacement ready and no credible plan to build one.
When the coal fleet stepped up in 2025 as gas prices spiked, it delivered an estimated $30 to $40 billion in combined power sector savings by displacing higher-cost generation.
Democrats spent years trying to kill the very resource that saved American consumers billions of dollars in a single year.
Today, those plants get to stay open. More can be built. And the 57 percent of Americans who told pollsters they wanted coal plants to keep running finally have a government willing to listen.
Sources:
- Thomas Catenacci, "Trump EPA Moves To Permanently Eliminate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rules for Power Plants," Washington Free Beacon, September 14, 2026.
- "EPA Proposes Repeal of Biden-Harris EPA Regulations for Power Plants," U.S. EPA Press Release, June 11, 2025.
- "President Trump and Administrator Zeldin Deliver Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History," U.S. EPA, February 13, 2026.
- "Americans Embrace the Coal Fleet," National Mining Association / Count on Coal, February 2026.
- "Betting the Grid on Gas," Count on Coal, September 2026.