Why Federal Regulations Fail to Cut Emissions

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading Dispatch Energy, a regular dive into the politics, policy, and innovation shaping America’s energy future, featuring a roster of subject-matter experts including Alex Trembath, Philip Rossetti, Lynne Kiesling, Rory Johnston, and Roger Pielke Jr. Welcome to Dispatch Energy! This month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally proposed eliminating federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, the principal cause of global climate change, under the Clean Air Act. This comes after last year’s rescission of the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis for those regulations, and this summer’s partial repeal of specific regulatory rules advanced by the Biden Administration. This is merely the latest escalation of a nearly 20-year fight, with the Obama and Biden administrations championing emissions regulations as a key tool in the climate policy toolbelt and successive Trump administrations warning that the rules would cause catastrophic spikes in domestic energy prices. Neither is correct. Federal emissions regulations have been, and will remain, modest in real-world impact. Breaking out of this partisan cycle will require Democrats to admit that Clean Air Act regulations will not contribute meaningfully to decarbonization, while Republicans need to understand that some sort of federal regulations may be preferable to the mess of state-based rules and “climate liability” lawsuits that are likely to result from vacating EPA’s authority. A Regulatory Tug-of-War Traffic in Los Angeles on February 13, 2026. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images) The EPA gained the authority to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane through a narrowly decided Supreme Court case. During the second George W. Bush administration, 12 states, led by Massachusetts, petitioned the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which had historically only covered “criteria pollutants” like sulfur and nitrogen oxides, ozone, and particulate matter. The EPA denied the petition, and the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the petitioners in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007. Since then, the EPA has had the authority to determine and execute regulations against any emissions the agency deemed to “endanger public health or welfare.” This regulatory approach was never a particularly good idea. Greenhouse gases are fundamentally different from conventional pollution. Ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, lead, and the other criteria pollutants are significantly more toxic than carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted when fossil fuels are combusted but are also exhaled from animal life, including humans. Greenhouse gases are emitted in vastly larger volumes than most conventional pollutants—indeed, since the carbon in fossil fuels bonds with oxygen during combustion, the greenhouse emissions are actually more massive than the fuel burned to produce them. Carbon is not a trace compound of a trivial economic activity; it is the essential element of the fossil fuels that provide the vast bulk of energy to modern human societies. Mitigating carbon emissions is not as technically simple as methods used to address criteria pollutants, such as installing smokestack scrubbers to reduce the pollution contributing to acid rain or catalytic converters in personal vehicles to prevent smog. And indeed, the Obama administration at one point endorsed a congressional effort to preempt these regulations. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey legislation, would have created a national cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, obviating the need for more traditional “command and control” regulations like those under the Clean Air Act. But after Waxman-Markey died in Congress, EPA regulations became the Obama White House’s preferred regulatory approach to climate change. Since then, these regulations have accomplished little, if any, emissions mitigation. President Barack Obama’s EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan in 2015 (which the Supreme Court stayed in 2016), President Donald Trump’s EPA proposed a different, much more limited version of the rule in 2019 (which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated in 2021), and President Joe Biden’s EPA proposed separate emissions rules for power plants and tailpipes in 2023. Only one of these rules, Biden’s emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles, ever went into effect, and that rule was functionally redundant to the longstanding Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations overseen by the Department of Transportation. And of course Trump’s EPA has since repealed the whole of the Biden-era emissions regulation regime, and then some. But even before these recent repeals, the judiciary spent much of the last decade narrowing the potential scope of federal emissions regulations. In the 2016 Clean Power Plan stay and in 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that regulations on the electric power sector had to be enforced at the level of individual power plants, not the sector as a whole. This made it much harder to write regulations that would, for instance, compel a systemic shift from coal to gas or gas to zero-carbon sources like solar and nuclear. With that ruling in hand, the Biden administration wrote power plant regulations predicated on deeply unrealistic assumptions about carbon capture technology and hydrogen co-firing at natural gas plants. Had Trump not taken back power in 2024, it’s likely that Biden’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0” would have been further picked apart by courts over its technical shortcomings. So it would be little exaggeration to say that, over 20 years, federal greenhouse emissions regulations have accomplished nothing in the real world. After carbon partisanship. That uninspiring history has not led to the boring, staid policy discussion one might expect of regulations that have never really taken effect. When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding, climate scientist Michael Mann called the scientific statement “the primary tool that we have had to actually regulate carbon emissions and meet our obligations under various global agreements to address the climate crisis.” Meanwhile, Zeldin described his regulatory repeal as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” For all the reasons articulated above, these repeals will have little impact on the trajectory of U.S. emissions, which have been steadily declining since 2007 for technological, not regulatory, reasons. But the Trump administration should tread carefully here, too. Just as a national cap-and-trade program would have preempted the Clean Air Act emissions rules, EPA’s authority arguably preempts state-level emissions regulations and other forms of emissions liability. As experts at the law firm Van Ness Feldman recently observed, the Trump administration’s proposals “may complicate that argument because EPA has proposed that it lacks authority.” These issues will get adjudicated at the highest level next month when the Supreme Court hears Suncor v. Boulder, which could have implications for dozens of similar climate lawsuits around the country today. However the court rules in that case, it’s time to stop this partisan merry-go-round. Neither the climate nor the U.S. energy system benefit from another round of sweeping repeals and bespoke rulemakings, nor from the open season of U.S. corporate climate liability the courts are currently sustaining. As of 2022, Congress has codified the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions as well as criteria pollutants. At least until Congress relitigates national emissions policy, those regulations should be consistent and modest, and they should preempt the mess of retroactive torts and consumer protection litigation underway in the U.S. court system right now. Achieving this policy and political equilibrium will not be easy. Doing so would require that Democrats stop treating emissions regulations like they will yield meaningful progress on decarbonization, and that Republicans stop treating them like they’re the leading cause of the nation’s energy system problems. Unfortunately, it’s long been clear that both parties prefer shadowboxing over symbolic climate action to pragmatic, bipartisan policymaking. Policy Watch Permitting reform lives? Almost a year after the House passed its signature infrastructure permitting reform legislation, the SPEED Act, the Senate appears close to a deal on companion legislation. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Martin Heinrich, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Lee, and others have been negotiating for months, promising to make good on a broad bipartisan permitting deal that fell apart in the final months of the Biden administration. On Tuesday, President Trump signaled his concession to a key Democratic demand: that his administration stop its “blockade” on wind projects. As of this writing, it appears any final deal will materialize after the midterm elections. As Roger Pielke, Jr. explored in a recent edition of Dispatch Energy, the backlash to artificial intelligence is in full swing. That could have deep implications for the U.S. electric power industry, which has experienced its fastest expansion in a generation over the past few years, in no small part due to power-hungry AI data centers. The Trump administration is one of the most visible holdouts, while Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in statehouses around the country call for slowdowns, pauses, and moratoria on frontier models and data center projects. If opposition ramps up much further, then the anticipated demand for advanced nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal power projects, power plant turbines, and other key energy technologies could founder. Further Reading “The AI race has changed the priorities,” Chico Harlan wrote in the New York Times this week. Harlan tracks the ways in which both policymakers and technology companies have shifted their attention from the dangers of emissions and climate change to data centers, agentic large-language models, and the ambitions of the artificial intelligence industry. As I wrote in my inaugural Dispatch Energy column last year, the era of the climate hawk is over. Alex Trembath is a contributor to Dispatch Energy and the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a policy think tank advancing technological solutions to environmental problems. He is one of the world’s leading advocates for ecomodernism and abundance. Alex’s work on climate policy and politics, energy technology, food and agriculture, and other environmental issues has been published by The Atlantic, National Review, Slate, Issues in Science and Technology, the Boston Globe, Politico, City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, and other leading media outlets. He has served as a fellow and adviser for Case Studies in the Environment, Roots of Progress, the Abundance Institute, and YIMBY Action. Alex also launched and helps organize the annual Abundance conference. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Bachelor’s in environmental economics and policy. Alex lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.