The Biden administration is planning to roll out aggressive new rules to regulate planet-warming pollution from natural gas power plants, three sources familiar with the plan and who have been briefed on the rules told CNN, in a move that could face fierce legal challenges.
President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency has been exploring ways to tighten the rules for not just new power plants that will run on natural gas, but existing plants too, the sources said. According to the sources, the rules would be more stringent than previously planned regulations, which aimed to control pollution from new natural gas power plants and would have effectively grandfathered existing plants into older rules.
The EPA’s new strategy on power plants has gained traction in the administration in the past few weeks, one source said, amid intense pressure from environmental groups.
The Biden administration frustrated those groups – and young, climate-minded voters – when it approved the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska in March. Since then, the administration has put forward an ambitious vehicle tailpipe rule that could revolutionize the car market in the US and see electric vehicles making up two-thirds of new car sales by 2032.
Importantly for the forthcoming power plant regulations, the electricity sector generates a quarter of all planet-warming pollution in the US, according to the EPA, and slashing that pollution quickly is key for the country to achieve net-zero climate emissions by 2050, as Biden has pledged to do.
The EPA did not comment on the details of the plan, noting that they were still under review. But EPA spokesperson Tim Carroll told CNN that the agency is “moving urgently to advance standards that protect people and the planet, building on the momentum from President Biden’s Investing in America economic agenda,…
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