Fueling The Conversation, Week of July 21st, 2025
With the One Big Beautiful Bill now signed into law, all eyes are on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Administrator Lee Zeldin’s efforts to further advance President Trump’s agenda of energy abundance. Though we will benefit tremendously from the policy gains in the Big Beautiful Bill, it will be less meaningful if the Biden-era restrictions on reliable energy production continue.
In March, the EPA announced the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, a move we wholeheartedly supported for ending rules that “have made it harder to build, produce, and thrive in the United States.” The EPA is reconsidering greenhouse gas (GHG) and mercury and air toxics (MATS) regulations, the 2009 Endangerment Finding, and dozens of other Obama and Biden-era rules that placed overly restrictive burdens on energy producers.
While Congress was busy producing the One Big Beautiful Bill, the EPA has been hard at work. On June 11, it proposed the repeal of all GHG emissions standards for the power sector and amendments to the MATS that would directly result in the shuttering of coal-fired power plants. Although these rules will have to go through the public comment period, proposing their repeal is a strong step that proves the EPA is serious about reliable energy production.
Both of these overly burdensome rules were put in place by the Biden administration even though U.S. pollution and GHG emissions have declined over the past 40 years while, at the same time, natural gas and oil production grew. Meanwhile, China continues to increase its GHG emissions through its massive coal fleet. Ironically, global elites and the media still declare China a “global leader in renewable energy deployment.”
Notably, the Biden EPA cared little about how they would impact industry, ignoring the legislative directive in the Clean Air Act to consider technical feasibility and cost. For instance, the GHG power plant rule required coal and new natural gas plants to install carbon capture and sequestration technology to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032, despite there being only one U.S. power plant in which carbon dioxide emissions are captured at scale. By forcing widespread use of an unproven technology, the Biden EPA threatened to shift investment away from natural gas and force the closure of the very coal plants that are vital to providing affordable, reliable, and dispatchable electricity.
In February, the EPA laid out its “Powering the Great American Comeback” Initiative, which ensures that the EPA’s role in protecting environmental quality doesn’t lead to high costs and permitting delays. As Zeldin has recognized, environmental quality and economic growth are closely linked. American natural gas, oil, and coal producers have led the way in developing technologies that reduce the environmental impact of energy production. These innovations cannot occur if companies are forced to comply with government-driven restrictions, forcing capital and manpower from productive work to regulatory compliance. When examining the trends in American energy growth and emissions reduction, it’s obvious that the best thing the EPA can do is remedy the regulatory damage of past administrations.
Over the next few months, we’ll be encouraging the EPA to finally rid us of the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 determination by the agency that GHG emissions “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” This flawed finding has led the agency to treat GHG emissions as harmful pollutants, even though they are not equivalent and were never authorized to do so by Congress. Eliminating the Endangerment Finding would be a big step towards ensuring producers don’t face the threat of new GHG regulations in the future.
Compared to the anti-energy policies of the Biden EPA, Administrator Zeldin’s recognition of trade-offs in environmental regulation is a welcome change of course for an agency that has for so long made it its mission to discourage energy production and the economic growth that goes along with it. With the IRA’s tax credits set to expire, now is the time for the EPA to continue its regulatory purge.
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Fueling the Conversation, a weekly column by IER President Tom Pyle, offers a principled take on energy events. Energy underpins all aspects of modern life, so policies that artificially limit production hurt everyday people paying to heat their homes and drive to work. “Green” groups push these policies for ideological reasons, but this column uses economic logic and hard facts to advocate for energy freedom.
