Below is the official comment CFACT’s Senior Policy Advisor Duggan Flanagan submitted to the Federal Register on August 7, 2025 in support of EPA’s “Repeal of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units”: 40 CFR Part 60 [EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0124; FRL-12674-01-OAR] RIN 2060-AW55
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In announcing a proposed rule to rescind the Obama Administration’s 2009 declaration that carbon dioxide emissions constitute an “endangerment” to the Earth’s climate, Environmental Protection Agency Commissioner Lee Zeldin called the 16-year-old declaration – justified by a wrongly decided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision at the time – “the holy Grail of the climate change religion.”
Zeldin lamented that the ruling was inspired by “people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country.” This questionable declaration was then used to put regulations on vehicles, airplanes, and stationary sources – to regulate segments of our economy out of existence. Most notably, the rules furthered President Obama’s campaign pledge to bankrupt the coal industry by charging huge sums for “all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
The concept of criteria air pollutants was incorporated into the 1990 Amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act. Those pollutants were particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. Carbon dioxide – the so-called pollutant added by the Supreme Court in 2009 – is not referenced in the statute. By 2009, the Clean Air Act had been quite successful in reducing emissions of criteria air pollutants from coal-fired power plants – at considerable expense to operators. Between 1990 and 2009, power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide had fallen from 16 million tons per year (tpy) to just 6 million tpy; today, that number was down to about 1 million tpy by 2019. This was accomplished only as electric utilities switched to lower sulfur coal, added scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide emissions, and found other ways to achieve compliance – or just switched to another fuel source.
The results were similar for nitrogen oxides. Smog-inducing nitrogen oxides emissions from coal-fired power plants just during “ozone season” fell from 2.75 million tons in 1990 to 800,000 tpy in 2009 to under 200,000 tpy in 2019. Overall nitrogen dioxide emissions fell from 6.5 million tpy in 1990 to 2 million tpy in 2009 and to just 400,000 tpy by 2019. A study by the National Energy Technology Laboratory found that pollution controls have reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of nitrogen oxides by 83 percent, sulfur dioxide emissions by 98 percent, and particulate matter emissions by 99.9 percent compared to plants without those controls. In short, the nation was well on its way to winning the battle to control criteria air pollutants by 2009 – and those victories today are nearly total.
The regulations were working. But that did not satisfy those, including President Barack Obama, who wanted to bankrupt the U.S. coal industry, a large portion of which had undertaken heavy expenditures to meet the Congressionally mandated criteria air pollutant reductions called for in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Since controlling water vapor emissions was a nonstarter, the only byproduct of power generation left that could be used as a weapon against the coal industry was life-sustaining carbon dioxide.