There are a multitude of arguments against this:

- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.

- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?

- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.

- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.

- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.

This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.

The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.

Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.

The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.

For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.

" "America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America." "

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/29/1158426645/jimmy-carters-envi...

New coal gasification projects in India

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...

At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.

We might want to at least on the high seas to combat global warming a bit.

Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...

The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.

Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.

But is it stupid if you want to sell some fossil fuels in the short to medium term?

Translated to American: "fuck you, I got mine"

From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)

The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.

I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.

Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?

Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”

Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use

I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.

'shielding', is applied to both the energy extraction process of fission activity AND the remnants.

you're definitely not clear on the meaning.

Après nous, le déluge!

Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.

It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.

> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals

China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.

With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.

Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.

In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.

The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.

Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.

is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point?

Complement.

China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.

And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up.

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...

(Page 14)

China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.

https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...

I don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands.

Yes, and?

That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.

> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.

Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.

Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...

China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...

For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.

Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.

> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.

It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...

Well yes, every piece of industry ends up contributing to climate change, but data centers are the one that's having a massive expansion in the west.

> Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

Can you tell us more about it, honestly, sounds interesting.

And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).

Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.

Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?

A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.

You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.

> the math doesn’t add up

There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.

> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.

Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.

From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.

Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.

Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.

Energy storage is required along with solar farms.

Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".

> Energy storage is required along with solar farms

How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.

There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.

Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.

Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?

Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.

Fear really IS the mindkiller! Stop being afraid and start educating yourself. You are on HN, you are supposed to be smart.

That is literally what you are doing right now.

Fox brain alert!

We have batteries for this. See Texas and California.

This gets tiring. No, china has no electricity problem in the night and their share of solar is off the roof.

What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.

Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.

Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.

Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.

One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.

This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission

If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.

This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.

you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.

"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"

Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.

My point is that after a large change, reversion to the mean should not be treated breathlessly, but viewed in a measured manner.

> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.

This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).

This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.

America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.

The good news is the war with Iran has done more to curtail greenhouse gas emissions than basically anything domestically Trump can do.

Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.

Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida

I'm so tired of this.

Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.

Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)

https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...

Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.

NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.

For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].

So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.

Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.

So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.

Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

Im really not seeing the comparison.

nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme

the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.

the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.

if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits

This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.

I mean we elected an outrageous criminal into office. I think we are in a post-shame society.

well, for the next 800 days

or can a dictator president do this at all without congress?

btw how many gallons of crude oil do you think the Epstein Memorial Ballroom can hold?

because we're going to need a new strategic oil reserve, he destroyed the current system by bottoming it out

The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.

I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s

He should be awarded the FIFA Environment Protection prize.

I think it will be downvoted for being unnecessarily inflamatory.

I love it when idiots announce themselves

You should go live in the vicinity of an area polluted by a factory or power plant.

The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039.

- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.

Not a law. A regulation. If it were a law, it would have required Congress to change. Not that that would likely have stopped this administration.

That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.

Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.

Also worth noting that they are being revoked.

Why is that notable?

Because without noting that, "revoked" sounds like all limits are being removed, rather than that we're back to the 2024 limits.

Because how else would you plant the seeds of doubt that this decision is fucked.

The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists CO₂ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).

That page is from 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...

IPCC first report was 1990, and the basic arithmetic of the atmosphere goes even further back.

Right, but the 1990 IPCC report doesn’t use the term “pollution” to refer to CO2: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a...

It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”

I was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...

I'm talking about redefining the term "pollution," not the term "greenhouse gas."

Carbon dioxide atmospheric pollution has been acknowledged since literally the 1800s. What era are you from? Are you 200 years old?

Did we call it “pollution” back then or something else? That is, did we lump CO2 conceptually into the same category as soot from coal plants and things like that?

Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.

Yes, labels matter; so let's take a step back and ask why you're fighting this argument? Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?

I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.

This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".

> There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition.

Source?

You need a source showing you that greenhouses gasses aren't pollution?

The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?

I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.

In the 1990 IPCC report it talks about “greenhouse gasses” and also about “air pollution” but treats those as two distinct things: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a.... For example, on page 97, it says “CO2 enrichment” may “enhance plant growth,” but that “enhanced levels of air pollution could also reduce this positive effect.” There’s it’s clearly talking about CO2 and air pollution as two different things that have opposite effects on plant growth.

Is the IPCC also “morons?”

We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.

How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?

> a booming industrial economy

Nothing more important than that!!

This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.

So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.