Governor Josh Shapiro has joined 21 states and a few local governments in suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its recent repeal of limits on climate-warming pollution from power plants.
Last month, the EPA repealed rules, created under President Biden, that limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas power plants.
In announcing the repeal, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the Trump administration was protecting American energy and would save the industry $310 billion and make energy more affordable for Americans. “[T]his is just the beginning,” he said. “We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed.”
EPA said its actions are expected to increase coal production for the power sector “by more than 10 times.”
Shapiro announced on X that he was joining the lawsuit, stating, “The science is clear: pollution is bad for our health, makes severe weather worse, threatens farmers’ crops, and hurts our environment…I’ll continue to stand up to the President to protect your health and safety.”
EPA announces rollback of climate pollution rules for power plants
Annie Fox, staff attorney at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Clean Air Council, said the Biden EPA collected extensive scientific evidence and public comment about the impacts of power plant climate pollution when creating the rule.
She said the Trump EPA did not follow proper procedure in rescinding it, “but more than that, they didn’t do the substantive work that they’re supposed to do,” she said. “They’re supposed to study the evidence thoroughly; they’re supposed to listen to experts. If they’re repealing this rule, they can’t just be what’s known as arbitrary and capricious.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the court challenge, explained the coalition’s reason for challenging the repeal in a press release: “EPA unlawfully abandoned these pollution limits without properly considering reasonable alternatives or the enormous health and climate costs of allowing more pollution into the atmosphere.”
James said people will pay for these greenhouse gas emissions with their health, especially in low-income and other overburdened communities, and cities and states will be on the hook for climate impacts.
“These changes also increase the financial burden on local and state governments, which must spend billions of dollars recovering from increasingly extreme weather,” she said.
In exchange, she said the administration is giving “the nation’s biggest polluters a free pass” to pollute.
EPA justification for rescinding the rule
The EPA said it is striking the power plant rules because the agency exceeded its own authority when “requiring control technologies that are not adequately demonstrated, effectively forcing plants to retire rather than setting standards they could actually meet.”
The rollback could affect dozens of gas plants and several coal plants in Pennsylvania.
When it was announced in September, Rachel Gleason, executive director of Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, told The Allegheny Front that the mid-Atlantic electric grid, PJM, is already strained by rising demand from artificial intelligence.
“[The repeal] would allow the coal fleet to continue to meet rising electricity demand,” Gleason said. “We need to maintain the coal plants and any… reliable [power source] and not force retirements with these kinds of policy decisions.”
Meanwhile, Fox, with Clean Air Council, said that as a major energy producer, Pennsylvania has a lot at stake. “It makes it all the more important and makes me all the more glad that Pennsylvania is standing up and saying these rules are necessary,” she said.
She predicts that the litigation could take years.
Another EPA proposal to end climate protections
When announcing the repeal, the EPA took a separate but related step to propose eliminating all remaining greenhouse gas emissions requirements for power plants, saying any potential public health harms are “too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted” to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector.
The agency argued that it lacks legal authority to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act.
If this proposal is finalized, Fox said it could prevent future administrations from creating climate protections and warned of increased greenhouse gases from new gas-fired power plants planned for Pennsylvania to serve data centers.
She points out that Pennsylvania has more than 100 AI data center proposals.
“Which means a mind-boggling amount of new power generation,” Fox said. “I can’t even imagine what our air will be like if we generate close to that much new power based off of fossil fuels without robust emissions controls.”
That EPA rule is currently open for public comment through November 2, 2026.
