AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered program today applauded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s final repeal of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, a rule widely known as the Clean Power Plan 2.0.
The final rule, announced on the sidelines of the G20 Energy Ministers’ Meeting in Houston, eliminates mandates that would have required most existing coal plants to capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2032 and set a variety of emissions requirements on new and existing natural gas units that would make them prohibitively expensive to build and operate. This requirement was projected to force billions in higher electricity costs on American families while eliminating the reliable baseload power the grid depends on.
In addition to the repeal rule, the EPA submitted a proposal to forego all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions regulations for power plants under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. In the proposal, the EPA adopted the temperature-impact methodology developed and championed by Life:Powered researchers, concluding that U.S. power sector GHG emissions do not meet the Clean Air Act’s legal threshold of “significantly contributing” to endangerment. If this proposal is finalized and survives the inevitable legal challenges, it will close the legal door on future administrations seeking to reimpose similar mandates.
At the heart of the EPA’s decision is the scientific analysis Life:Powered laid out in its June 2025 paper, The Materiality of U.S. CO₂ Emissions: that eliminating the entire U.S. power sector’s carbon emissions would reduce global temperatures by just 0.015°C by 2050, a figure representing only 7 percent of the ±0.1°C measurement uncertainty that exists in global surface temperature datasets. Because the projected climate impact of American power plant emissions is de minimis in the global context, those emissions cannot “significantly contribute” to endangerment, which is the standard for regulation under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act.
“For nearly a decade, Life:Powered has argued — and the EPA has now confirmed — that the Clean Air Act was never a valid legal basis for regulating carbon dioxide from power plants,” said Brent Bennett, Ph.D., Policy Director for Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Our analysis showed that U.S. power sector emissions would move global temperatures by just 0.015°C, a change indistinguishable from measurement noise. You cannot claim ‘significant contribution’ when the signal disappears into the uncertainty of the data itself. Today, sound science prevailed over a decade of regulatory overreach.”
Today’s action follows the Trump administration’s earlier repeal of the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding and the rollback of vehicle emissions standards, completing a comprehensive effort to restore proper legal boundaries to the EPA’s regulatory powers.