Tangle - The EPA’s power plant deregulation.

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the repeal of Biden-era emissions regulations for power plants and proposed rolling back all remaining greenhouse gas standards for the power sector. The agency said the move will create an estimated $310 billion in savings and lower energy prices for consumers. On Thursday, environmental advocates sued the EPA for this week’s power plant deregulatory actions.Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!“Am I the idiot?”For this week’s Suspension of the Rules, Kmele defends his position on AI deregulation as Ari channels some reader criticisms to him. Then, Isaac asks, “Am I the idiot?” over one of his recent takes and reacts to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s recent return to the Senate, before Kmele gives a touching tribute to the passing of a literary giant. Check it out here. Is our food safe?If you’ve seen a rash of recent headlines about food recalls affecting an array of products, you’ve probably wondered what’s going on with America’s food suppliers. In his latest report, Associate Producer Aidan Gorman explores what’s behind the recalls, whether they’re happening more frequently, and what the cases reveal about food safety in the U.S. Check it out here.We’re bad at this.Last week we had a team retreat. Something I realized while there is that we can do a better job making sure people know where to find us. Our core product is a newsletter, but we also have a podcast, YouTube channel, and Instagram page that all do incredible work covering the news with ideological diversity and intellectual honesty. So, here’s a reminder to take two minutes to follow us on your platform of choice:InstagramPodcastYouTubeYou can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think of the EPA’s latest deregulatory move? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Ari Weitzman and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, place where you get news from across the local spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take. I'm Tango's managing editor Ari Weitzman. I want to congratulate you first on making it to Thursday, which means you're basically at the weekend. Before you start unwinding, we want to unwind a story of our own today, which is the non-wined. motted thread about the EPA's removal of the greenhouse gas emissions regulations just for gas and coal-fired power plants. So it's getting complicated already, but stick with us and we'll

untangle it for you. See what I did there. We're also going to reach back to 1787 for a story about the signing of the Constitution. We'll end with a feel-good story about a charitable New Yorker. Stick around for this one. I'll be right back from my take. But first, I'm going to send it over to Will to read off the pot. Thank you, Ari. All right. Here are two. Today's quick hits. Number one, the Federal Open Market Committee voted unanimously to raise the Federal Reserve's benchmark interest rate by 0.25% to a range of 3.75% to 4%. And this was the first rate increase since 2023. Two House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, announced that the House will enter its legislative recess one day early.

sending lawmakers home until after the midterm elections. Representative Thomas Massey, a Republican from Kentucky, accused Republican leadership of taking the move to avoid a vote on his resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth. Three, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to join the bloc as its first, quote, associate member. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney expressed interest in the proposal while U.S. President Donald Trump called it, quote, laughable.

Four, Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have shot down a Saudi Arabian fighter jet as they continue to launch attacks against the kingdom and seize territory in the region. And five, OpenAI disclosed six incidents involving its artificial intelligence models, deemed, quote, unexpected or concerning, including instances where the systems accessed the internet without permission and attempted to hide information. The Environmental Protection Agency announced today it's repealing rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas fired power plants. The move eliminates requirements that would have forced some power plants to sharply reduce their emissions, including through technology

such as carbon capture and storage. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the rollback will help cut red tape. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, announced the repeal of Biden-era emissions regulations for power plants and proposed rolling back all remaining greenhouse gas standards for the power sector. The agency said the move will create an estimated $310 billion in savings and lower energy prices for consumers. A previous deregulation move from the EPA for vehicles is being challenged in court, and the power plant deregulation is also expected to be challenged. In 2024, the Biden administration's EPA enacted rules requiring all newly built gas-powered power plants and existing coal-fired power plants scopes to remain operational past 2039

to capture or cut 90% of their smokestack emissions by 2032. At the time, it projected that the regulations would prevent 1.380s,000,000,000,000,000,000, billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047. Before repealing the rule, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin rescinded the endangerment finding in February, removing the agency's scientific and legal justification for federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Zeldon's Monday announcement included two deregulatory provisions. The first, which has already been finalized, reverses the Biden-era regulations. The second, which still requires approval, would rescind greenhouse gas emissions requirements for all power plants

and prevent future administrations from implementing similar regulations. The EPA justified the rollback based on, quote, the best reading of the Clean Air Act, end quote, saying that the law did not give it the authority to regulate power plant emissions based on climate change concerns. Environmentalists criticized the deregulation, saying the effects of unregulated coal, and natural gas would be dangerous to public health and the environment. Quote, the repeal is going to mean more pollution, more extreme weather, higher electricity bills, because we're going to continue to rely on fossil fuels, end quote.

Patrick dropped the climate policy director at the Sierra Club said, calling the motivation for the move, quote, full-throated climate denial. Zeldin said that the Obama and Biden administrations had, quote, waged a war on coal and that the deregulation would lower electricity prices. Quote, at EPA, we follow a very simple principle. If Congress didn't authorize it, EPA shouldn't be doing it, he said. Additionally, energy industry groups said the repeal will improve the reliability of the U.S. electric grid and meet increasing electricity demand.

Today, we'll share views from the right and left on the EPA's changes, and then managing editor Ari Weitzman gives his take. We'll be right back after this quick break. Here is what the right is saying. The right mostly supports the rollback, arguing it will support U.S. energy production. Some say the EPA is pushing back on questionable claims about climate change. Others suggest more regulation doesn't mean a cleaner environment. In the Daily Caller, Mitch Rolling and Sarah Montabano wrote,

the EPA finally catches up with America's electricity needs. The Biden administration's rule, finalized in 2024, would have forced coal and new natural gas plants to install costly and commercially unproven carbon capture and sequestration technology to capture 90% of their emissions or shut down by 2039. Faced with complying in only six years, almost all coal plants would shudder rather than incur such high costs.

remaining coal plants and new natural gas plants would be saddled with new costs. Recending the rule is an ambitious first step and the right one. The administration should now correct the underlying flaws in how these rules are written that allowed the EPA to severely underestimate compliance costs. Regulators count as benefits the avoided cost of carbon, but neglect to account for the real human and economic costs of blackouts. Half the country is facing a risk of rolling blackouts by 2030 as demand climbs and dispatchable plants retire. The federal government's decision-making should reflect the costs of its choices.

In Blaze Media, Zach Laidlaw said the repeal counters climate hysteria over carbon emissions. The Clean Air Act has been around since the 1970s. The original version specifically targeted vehicle emissions, namely carbon monoxide, which is harmful to humans in concentrated quantities. However, in recent decades, the bill morphed to cover a broader range of, quote, pollutants. One of the more egregious restrictions came directly from the Biden administration, which used the Inflation Reduction Act to attack fossil fuels because of the carbon dioxide emitted during the burning process.

That is all about to change. On Monday, the EPA officially removed some of the power plant carbon emissions restrictions. Energy companies no longer have to abide by costly climate edicts of past administrations. American citizens save money on taxes, and finally, the people gain much-needed relief from climate change hysteria. And in the dispatch, Philip Rossetti explored why sweeping regulations won't end air pollution. For as long as air pollution has been debated, we've been inundated with imagery of smokestacks billowing soot into the atmosphere. This persistent framing gives the impression that little has changed in our efforts to fight air pollution, but the truth is that today's issues are much different than those of decades past.

For the six primary or criteria, air pollutants, carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone, emissions have fallen by 79% since 1970. There is an ever-shifting economically optimal level of air pollution abatement, and it's not always clear whether more regulation offers benefits that outweigh the cost. The complexities of regulatory benefit accounting make for poor policy discourse, though, and the EPA tends to prefer simpler methods to weigh regulatory costs and benefits. Regulators like to assume simple cost-efficient frameworks as regulated market shift, even if those assumptions are unrealistic.

While it's understandable that the EPA would prefer simpler cost-benefit methodology, the effect is that regulators can lean on secondary effects to justify extraordinarily burdensome regulation. Now here's what the left is saying. The left opposes the repeal, saying it lacks a sound justification. Some argue the move benefits power plant owners and harms the public.

Others criticize lawmakers for ignoring the rising costs of climate change. In The Guardian, Oliver Millman, and Sarah Sneat said the EPA's rationale for the repeal is far from convincing. In allowing U.S. power plants to emit any amount of planet heating pollution they wish to, the Trump administration made two striking claims, that this will cut Americans' electricity bills and that the pollution itself doesn't really matter anyway. Both claims struggle to stand up to even basic scrutiny. The EPA's own analysis published with the new rule outlines a very different picture. Retail electricity prices will actually be 0.7% higher in 2030, rather than lower,

as a result of the administration's rule change, the analysis shows. Power prices won't drop until the mid-2030s and beyond. The cost of running coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, which have been propped up by taxpayer funding and emergency non-closure orders by the administration, will continue to escalate the analysis fines with coal, delivered for power set to be 27.3% more expensive than otherwise by 2045. The U.S. power sector will be a significant factor in how much more dangerously hot it will get. American coal and gas plants would, if they were a country, be the fifth largest emitter in the world. The Trump administration's scrapping of pollution limits will unleash far more pollution and extra 406 million metric tons by 2035.

In MS Now, Steve Bennon wrote about the costs to the public of the EPA's change. Throughout Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's presidencies, the Democratic administrations took steps to address the climate crisis by imposing pollution limits on, among other things, coal-fired power plants. Donald Trump's administration continues to take dramatic steps in the opposite direction. As the Associated Press notes, the EPA's move, according to Trump's EPA, would, quote, remove more than $300 billion in costs for the industry, end quote. While it's true that removing the environmental safeguards would represent a financial windfall

for the companies that own these power plants, critics have pointed to the far greater costs to the public. The New York Times reported that, quote, the agency repealed the scientific determination that gave it the legal authority to create climate regulations in the first place. In recent history suggests that these new developments will spark federal litigation, which may very well lead to yet another fight at the U.S. Supreme Court. Environmental advocates have expressed concern that the dispute could open the door to the High Court's conservative majority, prohibiting the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases altogether. In the Hill, William S. Becker argued the world can't afford to ignore climate

change much longer. Our government could do something about climate change, but it refuses. In fact, most elected leaders and political candidates don't even talk about it. As the fossil fuel industry increasingly allied itself with Republicans to block climate action over the decades, Democrats became the party more willing to address it. But now, even many Democrats have gone quiet. As the November midterms approach, think tanks and consultants are advising them to avoid the topic of global warming because, quote, it is not a priority for voters. This is the irony of climate hushing.

Consultants advise candidates to talk about affordability instead of climate change when climate change is increasingly an affordability issue. It reduces property values, damages public health, raises taxes, increases the federal deficit, and more. Through 11 presidents and 31 congresses over the past 60 years, our national government has failed to act in a manner commensurate with the scale and duration of the crisis. All right, that is it for what the right and the left are saying. So now it's over to Ari Weidstman for his take. Ari, to you.

During the summer before my junior year of college, I volunteered with a nonprofit to help organize people who were going to publicly testify against a rule change President George W. Bush's EPA was considering at the time. I was one of a cohort of 11 undergraduates enrolled in the University of Chicago's first ever environmental studies major. the volunteering internship was my chance to put my education into practice,

learn a little bit more about policy, and get some school credit while I was at it. At the time, the EPA was considering change against national ambient air quality standards, or NAAQS, a regulation enacted from the Clean Air Act that sets limits for gases that are both emitted from diverse sources and endanger public health or welfare.

It defines six airborne pollutants under these criteria, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, lead, ozone, and fine particulate matter, like soot or industrial dust. These are the pollutants that usually come to mind when you think of poor air quality, chemicals and compounds that can be dangerous to breathe, even at very low concentrations. My group was helping gather and prepare members of the public to testify against the EPA's proposed change to its standard for ozone, a gas that is very helpful in the stratosphere, where it protects us from ultraviolet rays, but is classified as a pollutant in the troposphere, where it can burn our lungs and airways when we breathe it in. The EPA's existing safety standard for ozone was

0.08 parts per million or PPM. Ahead of its 2008 regulatory review, researchers at the EPA had determined a safe concentration for ozone was 0.06 parts per million, or at least no higher than 0.07. The EPA, however, determined that their NAAQS standard for ozone, would be 0.075, stricter than the existing standard, but more lenient than the latest recommendations of their experts. I learned an important lesson for my time preparing testimony before the EPA.

Environmental policy is never straightforward. The people who testified were straightforward, they were informed and they were earnest about their opinions. They had chronic emphysema or children with asthma and poor air quality wouldn't endanger their health. They took the time to prepare and they put some moving testimony in front of their own. review board. Then, after the session ended, my manager from the nonprofit pulled me into a surprisingly

congenial discussion with a person at the EPA. And in that discussion, I discovered that the Chicago's city government had already lobbied the EPA for this more lenient standard. There is no way the metropolitan region can meet the 0.07 proposed threshold. And if it was classified as non-attainment, then the city's federal funds for transportation projects, including public transit, would be The upshot was that the stricter standard would make public transit harder to fund, meaning more people traveling by car, meaning worse air quality for the metropolitan area. It turned out that the best thing for Chicago's air quality was actually for the EPA to impose a looser standard, the exact opposite of the thing I organized citizens to lobby for.

In 2008, I was an idealist who didn't realize he'd been cast for a role in a play. Now, in 2026, I have the immense privilege of sitting in the audience and penning a review. So let's take this issue head on. Kremlin dioxide, or CO2, is not classified as a pollutant under the EPA's NAAQS. And the Trump administration is entering the stage first, giving a haughty monologue, emphasizing that the EPA doesn't classify CO2 as a pollutant, and thus the endangerment finding is nonsense. A little more than an artifact of climate change hysteria.

The Trump EPA is strictly following the letter of the law, returning common sense to policy, delivering consumer choice to Americans, and advancing the American dream. So let's talk about the letter of the law. The Clean Air Act defines a pollutant as an airborne particle or chemical that causes or contribute significantly to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated

to endanger public health or welfare. Yes, the law says nothing about greenhouse gases specifically, and those gases and their role in climate change are not a part of the EPA's NAAQS restrictions. So in a way, Zeldon is right. In another, much more immediate way, Zeldon is wrong. According to Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, greenhouse gases do fit the Clean Air Act's definition of air pollutants. That means the opinion of the Supreme Court is that the letter of the law here

explicitly allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. thus the agency's 2009 endangerment finding. You may also remember that Zeldon has already rescinded the endangerment finding. He also repealed the EPA's tailpipe emission standards and off-cycle credits for vehicles. As I said of that decision, the likely effects would probably be the opposite of what you'd expect. Removing the standards probably won't impact vehicle emissions. Removing the credits will probably require vehicles to actually be more efficient, and the deregulation would probably end up costing the industry in the long run.

If Act 1's vehicle emission story is a farce, Act 2's power plant deregulation is much more of a drama. In 2024, the EPA, under President Biden, required long-term coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. They do this through carbon capture and storage technology or CCS, which captures CO2 at the smokestack before the gas can enter the atmosphere and allows these plants to sell it as a byproduct, usually to gas. gas drillers, ironically. Biden administration believed existing CCS technology is mature enough to enact these requirements. The Trump administration does not. Plainly, as someone convinced that greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change

and who despises coal plans, I think the Trump administration is right. The CCS technology in operation today often breaks and is prohibitively expensive. roughly 80% of large CCS projects in America have failed due to technical issues, cost overruns, or poor financial returns. When these systems are working, they consume about 15 to 25% of the energy output at these plants, meaning into their margins and making them economically and feasible to operate. And of course, that's the whole ballgame here. Democrats, with a large environmentalist constituency, want to close coal plants down. Republicans, with a large constituency of stakeholders in coal, want to keep them open.

Either way, over time, coal is going to lose. 99% of existing coal plants are more expensive to operate than new wind or solar plants would be. Coal is unhealthy both to those who live near plants and to those who mine it, and coal power is responsible for an ever-decreasing share of our national energy output. We're long past the fight over investing in coal. Today's battle, instead, is over whether to hasten the industry's demise or keep it on life support a little bit longer. And that brings us to the final act.

Can the EPA even do this? On one hand, of course it can. The EPA's whole purview is to decide how to enact existing laws. On the other hand, it actually has to enact those laws. Zeldon's attempt to remove these emission standards for vehicles is already being challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. As of just this morning, a challenge to the rescission attempt for power plants was brought to the same court. And I think it's likely to succeed.

Remember, the Supreme Court already ruled almost 20 years ago that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. And with Chevron deference repeal, any challenge that makes its way to the Supreme Court will be one that cedes less the agency deference and more to court precedent. It's hard to see this new deregulation surviving in that context. As with Cole itself, the overriding question for me is how long we have to wait before the curtain falls. That's it for my take, so I'm going to send it back to Will for the rest of the pod. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thanks, Ari. All right, and now a little bit about this day in history.

On September 17, 1787, 39 delegates of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed the Constitution of the Constitution of, of the United States. During and after the American Revolution, the United States was governed by the Second Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles gave little power to the central government, instead leaving most powers in the hands of the states. But problems with the Articles of Confederation soon became apparent, chiefly involving money and sovereignty. Confederation printed money was nearly worthless. States didn't pay sufficient. taxes, and debt interest only grew because the central government couldn't enforce tax provisions. Meanwhile, that government couldn't muster responses to military threats and couldn't pay soldiers.

In response to these crises, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in February 1787. At first, the convention only planned to revise the Articles of Confederation, but the delegates soon began devising plans to replace the articles with a new binding government. structure. Two main plans were proposed. The Virginia plan, which favored more populous states, and the New Jersey plan favoring smaller states. The plans drew on Enlightenment-era political philosophy from the likes of Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, and Blackstone. As the convention went on, the delegates considered and approved compromises that would help balance the concerns of larger and smaller states, and these compromises formed the basis for the modern-day Senate and House of

Representatives. Another such compromise was the now infamous three-fifths compromise, allowing slave states to count three-fifths of their slaves for popular representation purposes. Slowly but surely, the delegates came to an agreement on a new document, the Constitution. On September 17th, 39 delegates signed the document, sending it to the states for ratification. One year later, the Confederation Congress certified 11 states ratification, finalizing the Constitution's adoption. Now here's a little bit about the stories we almost covered this week, but didn't. As the week went on, the number of potential main story topics grew. The second half of the week brought Senator Mitch McConnell's return to the Senate,

congressional hearings for FBI director Cash Patel and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania, the Kennedy Senator closure vote, and the Air Force Secretary announcing that the U.S. has weapons in space. As we often say when we reflect on the week on Thursdays, all of these were compelling options and may warrant full coverage next week or beyond. However, the Supreme Court's order blocking President Trump's

mail-and-ballot executive action from taking effect was a more significant, timely story. Meanwhile, today's edition on the EPA emissions rollback offered the chance to wade into a policy debate on regulatory action and climate change that we wanted to tackle while it was still fresh. And last but not least, here is today's Have a Nice Day story. When Scott Evans saw CBS News New York's report

on Nina Chambers and her three children, who lost their home in a fire in June, he was moved to action. Evans reached out to the reporter who covered the story, and she connected him with Chambers. Evans then gave her $3,000 to feed her children and get them supplies for the upcoming school year. Chambers and her children had been living in a hotel and scraping by to make ends meet, but with help from Evans' gift, she has been able to secure a new apartment while earning a degree in human services. Evans, who Chambers called, quote, an angel, said he was glad to be able to support a family in need.

quote, this was something, one of the things that I could do something about, he said. CBS, New York has this story, and you'll find the link to it in today's show notes. All right, that is it for today's edition. Thanks again for being with us for another week of news and politics and analysis and discussion. We will be back tomorrow with a Friday edition, sneak peek. We've got a guest writer tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. And we will also talk to you next week and beyond. Until then, have a great day.

And peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorehead and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership,

please visit our website at retangle.com.