EPA Slices and Dices Stats to Treat Pollution as ‘Insignificant’

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing “to repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants” because it finds that their emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”

This claim is surprising: The power sector is responsible for roughly a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions and is the largest industrial emitter. The EPA’s workaround is to argue that a sector that emits only 3% of global emissions is too little to matter.

But while the EPA is playing with fractions, it’s ignoring facts. Even one year of US power-sector greenhouse gas emissions will cause hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damages and thousands of premature deaths from climate effects. These emissions are clearly significant by any measure—including under the EPA’s long-standing approach to controlling dangerous air pollution under the Clean Air Act.

Nothing in the EPA’s legal authority under the Clean Air Act supports ignoring emissions that don’t surpass an arbitrary percentage of global totals. Rather, the law requires the agency to regulate air pollution from any category of stationary source that the agency finds “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution.”

The EPA classified coal- and gas-fired power plants as significant sources of air pollution back in the 1970s, based on their soot and smog emissions. The US Supreme Court has further made clear that the EPA’s obligation to regulate dangerous air pollution extends to greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. No additional greenhouse gas-specific significance finding is required.

The Trump administration itself previously recognized the undeniable significance of power sector emissions. In 2021, Trump’s EPA finalized a rule determining that coal- and gas-fired power plants were significant contributors of greenhouse gas emissions.

That the Trump administration is now abandoning its own prior stance is remarkable not just for ignoring clear scientific and economic evidence, but also for its break with past agency practices. In fact, the EPA has a long history of regulating much smaller sources of pollution based on their dangers to public health and welfare.

For example, in 1982, the EPA found that even though lead-acid battery manufacturing produced less than 1% of national lead emissions, these emissions were significant because they contribute to already high and dangerous levels of atmospheric lead in urban areas.

Such an approach makes sense because even 1% of a pollution problem can itself be very harmful—and a relatively small share of a large pollution problem can still constitute a very large amount of pollution. In 2019, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit made this very point when it starkly reminded electric power plants that their allegedly “very small portion” of a “gargantuan source of water pollution” can still constitute “a gargantuan source of water pollution on its own terms.”

Any value can appear relatively small if compared to a big enough denominator. The US population is just 4.2% of a global headcount, and Pennsylvania’s population is just 3.8% of the US total. Illinois’ GDP is 3.5% of the country’s, and California’s GDP is 3.2% of the world’s, but either state’s economy would outrank the economies of most countries.

Apple Inc.—valued at $3 trillion—has a mere 5% of the US total market capitalization. Tesla Inc., valued at $1 trillion, has less than 2%. Would the Trump administration deem either company “insignificant”?

The relative size of these clearly significant values tells us little about their importance.

The US power sector’s contributions to climate change are significant both as a relative share and on their own terms. If the US power sector were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide—larger than the total emissions from Germany, France, and Italy combined.

A recent report from the Institute of Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law estimates the precise damages caused by US power-sector greenhouse gas emissions, using the most sophisticated, peer-reviewed models available. A single year of these emissions will cause $370 billion in global damages, including more than 5,300 deaths in the US from long-term temperature extremes and wildfire smoke caused by climate change. It doesn’t take many years for that to add up to tens of thousands of premature deaths and trillions of dollars in damages.

To put this in perspective, one year of US power-plant emissions will contribute to more deaths from climate change than annual US deaths from HIV (5,000) or cervical cancer (4,400). And this is only a partial estimate of US mortalities because it doesn’t include deaths from other climate change effects such as more extreme hurricanes and flooding.

If power sector emissions don’t pass the EPA’s new, made-up threshold for significance, it’s hard to imagine what would. In the US, only transportation emits (slightly) more greenhouse gases than power plants; every other industrial sector is smaller.

Under its new logic, the EPA could theoretically slice and dice the climate change problem until no US sector would ever count as a significant source of greenhouse gases—a clearly irrational outcome that contradicts the facts and the Clean Air Act’s purpose to comprehensively protect public health and the environment.

The EPA’s new approach boils down to climate nihilism: It dismisses the many actions that could cumulatively fix climate change because none of them can individually solve the entire problem. But there’s no panacea for a problem as large as global climate change; it requires a multitude of partial solutions.

Reducing US power sector emissions may not singlehandedly solve climate change, but that’s not a free pass for the EPA to do nothing and leave the public to suffer the mounting harms of this pollution.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Dena Adler is a senior attorney and Jason A. Schwartz is the legal director at NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to improving the quality of governmental decision-making.

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