EDF Strongly Opposes Repeal of Power Plant Pollution Standards at Public Hearing

(Washington, D.C. – July 8, 2025) An Environmental Defense Fund expert joined more than one hundred other Americans at a Trump EPA hearing today and opposed plans to repeal our national climate pollution standards for power plants.

Last month the Trump administration proposed eliminating the Carbon Pollution Standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, one of the largest sources of climate pollution in the U.S. That action would put people across the country at increased risk from the dangers of climate change, including extreme heat waves, drought, catastrophic fires, severe storms, floods, rising sea levels, and soaring home insurance premiums.

Today the Trump EPA held its one and only public hearing on the proposal. Richard Yates testified for EDF. 

“The standards protect the public health and welfare from the dangers of power plant air pollution, as Congress required under the Clean Air Act,” said Yates in his testimony. “EPA’s proposal to repeal the 2024 standards would effectively remove all nationwide emission limits on greenhouse gases from fossil plants in dereliction of that obligation and in a way that would expose Americans to more climate disruption and more pollution-driven death and disease.”

You can read Yates’s full testimony here. 

The Trump EPA’s own analysis of its proposal finds that it will cause thousands of premature deaths and cost the nation tens of billions of dollars in health care costs, although that information is not in the proposal itself, it is buried in the Regulatory Impact Analysis that EPA was required to prepare with it.