The Trump administration this week completed its erasure of major climate regulations by rescinding limits on planet-warming pollution from power plants, reinforcing its legal strategy to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from curbing them under a future president.
The latest rulemakings follow a series of policy changes over the last 18 months that are expected to slow down the U.S. clean energy transition and cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. Burning fossil fuels is the largest driver of global warming, which is already causing deadlier heat waves and more destructive hurricanes and wildfires.
In 2024, ahead of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the U.S was on track to slash emissions by between 38% and 56% by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group. That projected drop was largely due to the growth of clean energy like solar, wind, and nuclear accounting for an increasing share of power generation, between 62% and 88%, thanks in part to federal subsidies enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act and EPA’s emissions limits on fossil fuels.
Nearly two years later, each of those estimates have been revised downward. The U.S. is forecast to cut emissions by between 28% and 36% by 2035, while clean energy will account for between 49% to 65% of power generation by that date, the Rhodium Group has found.
The think tank’s latest annual analysis reflects the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks, including how the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill phased out tax credits for solar and wind and EPA’s walk-back of Biden-era carbon pollution standards for existing coal power plants and new gas plants, initially proposed last year and finalized this week. EPA in February also rescinded limits on emissions from vehicles, along with its own conclusion from 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger human health. That so-called “endangerment finding” underpinned federal climate regulations issued by the Obama and Biden administrations.
Clean energy generation is still expected to surge over the next several years, with up to 50 gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage added annually to the grid through 2030 because many developers were able to lock-in tax credits before a July 4 deadline.
But after 2030, the sector’s growth is a lot more uncertain. While there’s a chance that record clean energy deployment continues, it could also “slow to a trickle” — meaning just 3 GW of new capacity a year. That depends on how the cost of solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear power compare to gas prices. If gas is cheap, emissions could slightly increase as gas meets surging electricity demand from data centers and electric vehicles.
“We assume that the ability to add new gas to the grid is constrained for the next few years due to turbine backlogs,” Ben King, director of Rhodium Group’s clean energy and climate practice, told Latitude Media in an interview. “But then we see a much bleaker picture for renewables because now not only are the tax credits gone, but there also isn’t support from the power plant regulations.”
King added that the hallmark of those now-rescinded EPA rules was their acceleration of coal plant retirements. U.S. coal plants — and therefore emissions — have been on a steady decline since 2005 as the power sector switched to cheaper and cleaner gas. Rhodium Group in 2024 forecast that coal generation would drop to virtually zero by 2035 in part due to the EPA rules, which required existing plants to capture nearly all of their emissions by 2039 or shut down. Existing gas plants weren’t covered by the regulations, but new ones were, and would have had to switch to cleaner fuels like hydrogen or adopt carbon capture technology.
The downward trend of fossil fuel use is reversing, however. The Trump administration argues that both coal and gas plants are needed to meet surging electricity demand from data centers and prevent regional power outages when the grid is stressed, such as during extreme weather. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has ordered at least six coal plants to stay open beyond their scheduled closure dates, while some utilities have independently decided to delay retirements, citing new load growth from data centers.
However, a federal appeals court last week ruled that the administration had overstepped its authority in ordering a Michigan coal plant to stay open, dealing a blow to Trump’s effort to prop up the industry. Wright has issued the recurring orders under the Federal Power Act, which relied on Trump’s January 2025 executive order declaring a national energy emergency.
Shaky legal grounds
Several environmental lawyers told Latitude Media that the Trump administration’s novel arguments for why EPA lacks the authority to regulate emissions are rife with legal vulnerabilities.
The latest was laid out by EPA on Monday in a separate proposed rule justifying its rescission of the power plant rules. The agency argued that removing all carbon emissions from the sector “would not materially address the public health and welfare dangers attributed to global climate change concerns.” Therefore, the agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.
EPA is effectively saying it’s futile to control emissions from power plants because climate change is such a big, global problem, according to Dena Adler, a senior attorney at Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at New York University’s law school.
“This claim runs contrary to everything the CAA stands for and decades of past agency practice recognizing that even a small portion of a very large pollution problem can itself be enormous,” Adler said.
The U.S. power sector is the second-largest source of emissions, behind transportation, spewing as much greenhouse gas as entire countries like Japan and Germany. Climate scientists for decades have urged the industrialized world to slash emissions to avoid the worst effects of rising global temperatures.
Adler added that if successful in court, EPA’s legal strategy could prevent future emissions limits for power plants. But it’s a “big gamble” because the Supreme Court in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA ruled that greenhouse gases fit the definition of an air pollutant that can be regulated. SCOTUS instructed the agency to issue a scientific finding on whether emissions endanger public health, leading to its 2009 finding.
