There are a multitude of arguments against this:<p>- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.<p>- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?<p>- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.<p>- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.<p>- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.<p>This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.<p>Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.
Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...
The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.<p>Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.
But is it stupid if you want to sell some fossil fuels in the short to medium term?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge</a>
From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)<p>The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.<p>I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.
Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?
Because it'll create <i>value</i>.<p><i>Value</i> which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.<p>So, no biggie.
Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”
Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use
define 'climate pollution', this is all fine and well until they apply it to nuclear shielding.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_cruelty_is_the_point" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_cruelty_is_the_point</a>
Après nous, le déluge!
Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.<p>It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals<p>China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.<p>With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.
In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.<p>The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.<p>Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point?
China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.
And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up.<p><a href="https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Transition-Review-2026.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...</a><p>(Page 14)
China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.<p><a href="https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in-2025-even-as-it-burns-less/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...</a><p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-region-expand-coal-to-oil-output-energy-security-push-2026-06-12/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...</a>
Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.<p>Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.<p>Now, <i>this is impressive</i>, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.
Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of-france-s-electricity-comes-from-low-carbon-sources" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...</a><p>China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-china-s-electricity-comes-from-low-carbon-sources" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...</a>
> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.<p>It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing <i>everyone's</i> grandchildren, and not <i>nearly</i> enough people actually cared when we <i>could</i> have still done something about it...
The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.<p>The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).
Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.<p>Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?<p>A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.<p>You can't wave your arms like a <i>Peanuts</i> cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
> the math doesn’t add up<p>There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.<p>Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.<p>From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.<p>Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.<p>Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water.ca.gov/fishpassage/docs/dams/dams.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam</a>
Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.<p>Energy storage is required along with solar farms.
What <i>an opinion</i> to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors<p>Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.<p>One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission
If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.
This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.
you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.<p>"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"<p>Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
My point is that after a large change, reversion to the mean should not be treated breathlessly, but viewed in a measured manner.<p>> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.<p>This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.<p>America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.
The good news is the war with Iran has done more to curtail greenhouse gas emissions than basically anything domestically Trump can do.<p>Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.
Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida
I'm so tired of this.<p>Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)<p><a href="https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-canada-launches-planetary-boundaries-laser-talk-booklet/" rel="nofollow">https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...</a>
This comment thread shows that, if anything, the Americans want this. If they released exhaust fume inhalers, the majority of the US population would willingly buy one and take hit after hit to disprove the myth of weird, alien things like "caring about the environment" while quietly wheezing about "but China..." to themselves.
Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.<p>NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.<p>For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article <i>No one goes to war over a solar panel</i> [1].<p>So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.<p>Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the <i>decline rate</i>. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.<p>So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells <i>every year just to maintain that level of production</i>.<p>Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar-panel/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...</a>
This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.
well, for the next 800 days<p>or can a dictator president do this at all without congress?<p>btw how many gallons of crude oil do you think the Epstein Memorial Ballroom can hold?<p>because we're going to need a new strategic oil reserve, he destroyed the current system by bottoming it out
The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.<p>I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
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The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039.<p>- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.
Not a law. A regulation. If it were a law, it would have required Congress to change. Not that that would likely have stopped this administration.
That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.
Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.
I don't see the point of trying to redefine "pollution" to include CO2. We have been discussing climate change for decades, but it was only recently that people tried to shoehorn CO2 into category of "pollution." It just takes a category where society has some consensus and then shoehorns some new disputed idea into existing category. It's an end-run around the process of building consensus around the new thing.
The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists CO₂ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).<p>That page is from 2002.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&oldid=2889" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...</a>
IPCC first report was 1990, and the basic arithmetic of the atmosphere goes even further back.
Right, but the 1990 IPCC report doesn’t use the term “pollution” to refer to CO2: <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_full_report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a...</a><p>It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
I was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...
I'm talking about redefining the term "pollution," not the term "greenhouse gas."
I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.
This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".
I think this is good idea. I am not against combating climate change, but it can't come at the expanse of our economy. If you disagree stop using whatever device you are reading this on.
Good to see some action away from "climate" regulations ruining the energy sector and making everything downstream more expensive. You can't have a booming industrial economy without cheap energy. And no, having strict regulations that just end up moving production offshore doesn't solve anything. It just moves to pollution to China or India or whatever.
We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.
How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?
> a booming industrial economy<p>Nothing more important than that!!
This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.
So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.