Via the Texas Public Policy Foundation:
Here’s some great news that probably won’t make the evening headlines: the EPA just proposed stopping CO2 regulations on existing power plants. Why? Because they finally admitted what we’ve been saying for years – U.S. power plant emissions just don’t make a meaningful difference to global climate.
This is huge. For nearly a decade, Life:Powered has been arguing that the Clean Air Act doesn’t actually give the EPA authority to regulate CO2 from power plants. And now? The EPA is basically agreeing with us.
Let’s Break Down the Science (Don’t Worry, It’s Not That Complicated)
Here’s the thing about CO2 that environmental activists don’t want you to know: it’s not actually toxic to humans. In fact, we breathe it out with every exhale, and plants need it to survive. You’d need CO2 levels to be 20-30 times higher than they are now before it would affect your breathing. It should not be regulated in the same way as pollution that is directly harmful, like particulate matter and ozone.
But the argument is that because CO2 affects global temperatures, it then affects weather patterns and public health. Never mind that the IPCC itself says that we won’t be able to statistically discern the impact of climate change on extreme weather for many more decades or that extreme weather is not detectably trending upward. Let’s just consider the math on how much U.S. power plants are contributing to global climate change.
When scientists try to measure the temperature of the entire planet, they’re dealing with an uncertainty of about ±0.1°C. That’s just the built-in “noise” in the data – the margin of error that comes with trying to take Earth’s temperature.
Now, our latest research shows that even if we completely eliminated all U.S. power plant CO2 emissions, global temperatures would only drop by 0.015°C by 2050. That’s about one-seventh of the measurement error we just talked about. Even if we went completely crazy and eliminated ALL U.S. CO2 emissions from every source – cars, trucks, factories, everything – we’re still only talking about a 0.052°C difference by 2050.
Think about what this means: if you can’t even measure the impact of U.S. emissions above the background noise in the data, how can you meaningfully regulate those emissions? It’s like trying to measure the effect of removing a cup of water from Lake Superior. You might feel good about doing it, but you’re not going to notice any difference in the water level.
The challenge ahead is that, while EPA acknowledges the argument that U.S. power plant emissions do not contribute significantly to climate change, they don’t actually show the data above that is needed to prove the argument. In order to survive the inevitable court challenges, they should strengthen their argument by modeling these temperature impacts rather than just saying, as they do in the proposed rule, that U.S. emissions are a small and declining percentage of global emissions.
Trump Kills California’s EV Mandate (And 16 Other States Are Mad About It)
In other excellent news, President Trump just signed legislation that puts the brakes on California’s plan to force everyone into electric vehicles by 2035. And here’s the kicker – this doesn’t just affect California. Sixteen other states had jumped on the Golden State’s bandwagon, representing about 30% of the U.S. car market. According to research from Life:Powered’s policy director, Brent Bennett, and former director, Jason Isaac, these mandates amounted to a subsidy of about $7,000 per EV in 2023, almost as much as the federal EV tax credit.
Here’s how this insanity was brought to a halt: Congress used something called the Congressional Review Act to overturn the federal waiver that let California set its own vehicle emission standards. This waiver has been around for decades because California has uniquely bad smog problems, but using it to essentially mandate EVs nationwide? That was a bridge too far.
The politics got messy fast. The Senate had to override the opinion of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which said the action was not a rule and therefore was ineligible to be repealed, to make this happen. California is planning to sue over this, with Governor Newsom calling Trump “a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.” Apparently believing in consumer choice makes you a corporate puppet now.
Automakers like GM and Toyota lobbied FOR this rollback because they said California’s 2035 deadline was impossible to meet. On the flip side, environmental groups and EV companies are predictably upset about the whole thing.
The good news is that the action is likely to hold up in court, as the opinion of the GAO is not legally binding even though Congress has a long history of deferring to it. The even better news is that the action will permanently forbid California and other states from seeking waivers from future administrations.
Why This All Matters
Both of these developments point to the same thing: we’re finally getting back to energy policies based on actual science and economic reality instead of wishful thinking and virtue signaling.
The EPA power plant rule acknowledges that you can’t regulate something just because you don’t like it – you need to prove it’s actually causing measurable harm. And the California EV mandate reversal recognizes that states shouldn’t be able to dictate national automotive policy, especially when the deadlines are completely unrealistic.
Bottom line: If both actions succeed in the courts—and we are confident that they will—Americans will have permanent relief from these overbearing regulations. Americans should have access to reliable, affordable electricity any source as determined by electricity markets, and they should have the freedom to the choose the vehicles that they need to power their lives. These policy changes move us closer to that goal.
