E.P.A. Severely Limits Pollution From Coal Burning Power 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 coal-fired 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 percent of their greenhouse pollution by 2039, one year earlier than the agency had initially proposed. The compressed timeline was welcomed by climate activists but condemned by coal executives who said the new standards would be impossible to meet.
The E.P.A. 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 United States of the carbon pollution that is driving climate change.
President Biden wants to cut that pollution by about 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, and to eliminate emissions from the power sector by 2035.