The EPA, Power Plants And Planetary Boundaries – Everything Is Connected

Last Updated on: 14th June 2025, 01:00 am

This week, the EPA announced its intention not to protect the environment by rolling back the rules put in place by those hated socialists Barack Obama and Joe Biden that limit emissions from thermal generating plants. What this failed administration is saying is simply this — corporations are more important than people. During his inauguration speech in January, the putative president shouted, “We will drill, baby, drill.”

Rest assured, gentle reader, this is not about rolling back pollution rules from power plants. It is about eliminating them. Here is the summary from the EPA’s proposal, which makes its intentions crystal clear:

“In this action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. The EPA is proposing that the Clean Air Act (CAA) requires it to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution, as a predicate to regulating GHG emissions from those plants. The EPA is further proposing to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.

“The EPA is also proposing, as an alternative, to repeal a narrower set of requirements that includes the emission guidelines for existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating units, the carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS)-based standards for coal-fired steam generating units undertaking a large modification, and the CCS-based standards for new base load stationary combustion turbines.”

The crux of the EPA’s argument is that carbon dioxide emissions from thermal generating stations have decreased from about 5.5 percent of global emissions in 2005 to about 3 percent today. Therefore, reducing those emissions further, as directed by the Biden administration, would have little effect on public health. But CleanTechnica readers, who are all well above average, will note the new proposal form EPA is not about rolling back the standard set by the prior administration. It is about eliminating all restrictions on power plant emissions. If you don’t believe that, go back and read the first sentence of its proposal again.

Support For The EPA Roll Back

Lee Zeldin, the stooge heading the EPA today, crowed, “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal, EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”

According to NPR, Rich Nolan, head of the National Mining Association, added his own endorsement. “We applaud the Trump administration’s work to counter the Biden administration’s direct assault on coal power.” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey called the proposal “a major victory for West Virginia, our energy producers, and every American who depends on reliable, affordable electricity.” Morrisey’s comment is a swipe at renewables and pays homage to the shibboleth of “baseload power,” a construct that Michael Barnard exposed as antiquated in a recent CleanTechnica article.

Wyoming is the top coal-producing state in America, so naturally its governor, Mark Gordon, embraced the EPA proposal. “Today, I welcome the proposed repeal by the EPA of the so-called Clean Power Plan Version 2 that [EPA] Administrator Lee Zeldin and I have discussed over the past several months, and I encourage him to proceed with it with all due urgency. The lopsided and misguided policies of the Biden administration have already wreaked enough havoc on our nation’s power supply and delayed our progress providing the beautiful clean coal President Donald Trump recognizes as essential to having a reliable, affordable and dispatchable energy supply for our nation.”

Not Everyone Is Thrilled

Not everyone is delighted by the new EPA policy initiative. “These regressive proposals are bad for public health and bad for climate, all to prop up some of the highest polluting power plants in the nation,” Shaun Goho, legal director at Clean Air Task Force, wrote in a statement. “The EPA is hoisting the white flag of surrender on the power plant pollution that’s poisoning the air we breathe and harming our climate,” wrote Manish Bapna, CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“As Trump and his EPA continue to shovel dirty old coal down our throats, they’re now adding more toxic heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic to the mix,” said Ryan Maher, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If these reckless rollbacks are allowed to stand they’ll only fan the flames of extreme heat and wildfires, and they’ll trigger more child deaths, more cancers, more lung diseases, and more heart attacks.”

The EPA And Ocean Acidification

Ryan Maher is not wrong. Fossil fuels are now the official religion of the United States, and many Americans are bowing and praying in support of the movement. The problem, of course, is that in order to do so, they have to reject science. America is on its way back to the good old days when witches were burned at the stake and non-believers were stripped naked, dunked in hot tar, covered in feathers, and ridden out of town on a rail. Travelers of every description are now required to surrender their electronic devices to jackbooted authorities who scrutinize their social media accounts and contacts for any hint that they might harbor thoughts that are not in line with prescribed dogma.

But while America is drinking deeply of the fossil fuel Kool-Aid, things are happening in the environment because of the rising levels of pollution in the atmosphere. Some believe that there is no such thing as too much carbon dioxide. How could that be? Plants need carbon dioxide to grow. That’s true, but as my old Irish grandmother liked to say, there can be too much of a good thing. Water is also essential to life, but too much water can be deadly, as the passengers on the Titanic discovered to their sorrow on April 15, 1912.

When there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more of it gets dissolved in the waters of the ocean, which creates carbonic acid. In a study published June 9, 2025, in the journal Global Change Biology, scientists published the results of research conducted on behalf of the European Space Agency, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing and Ocean Acidification Programs, NOAA, and the Slovene Research Agency. Here is the abstract from that study:

“Ocean acidification has been identified in the Planetary Boundary Framework as a planetary process approaching a boundary that could lead to unacceptable environmental change. Using revised estimates of pre-industrial aragonite saturation state, state-of-the-art data-model products, including uncertainties and assessing impact on ecological indicators, we improve upon the ocean acidification planetary boundary assessment and demonstrate that by 2020, the average global ocean conditions had already crossed into the uncertainty range of the ocean acidification boundary.

“This analysis was further extended to the subsurface ocean, revealing that up to 60% of the global subsurface ocean (down to 200 m) had crossed that boundary, compared to over 40% of the global surface ocean. These changes result in significant declines in suitable habitats for important calcifying species, including 43% reduction in habitat for tropical and subtropical coral reefs, up to 61% for polar pteropods, and 13% for coastal bivalves. By including these additional considerations, we suggest a revised boundary of 10% reduction from pre-industrial conditions more adequately prevents risk to marine ecosystems and their services; a benchmark which was surpassed by year 2000 across the entire surface ocean.”

Breaching Planetary Boundaries

According to Paul Hormick at Green Dispatch, the idea of planetary boundaries was first proposed in 2009 by a group of climate scientists led by former Stockholm Resilience Center director Johan Rockström. They represent boundaries on global processes affected by human activity. If these limits are crossed, permanent, unacceptable environmental change becomes reality for planet Earth.

Hormick writes: “Ocean acidification is particularly problematic for creatures such as oysters, clams, and sea urchins. The increased acidity makes it difficult for them to form their shells. Corals also have a harder time forming their structures. Creatures such as sea stars have difficulty forming their protective outer layers in acidic oceans.

“Because of ocean currents, temperature variations, and other factors, the level of ocean acidification varies throughout the world. Acidity in tropical regions can be twice that of polar regions. Recent research has also found that acidification is spreading to deeper waters. The authors of this most recent paper extended their inquiry to the subsurface ocean and found that up to 60 percent of the global subsurface waters — down to 600 feet — had crossed the planetary boundary, compared to around 40 percent of the surface oceans.”

We alter the acidity of the ocean at our peril. Billions of people rely on the seas for their sustenance. There is a so-called food chain that starts with phytoplankton. We may believe we would never eat such tiny organisms, but in fact they are the source of all the food that marine animals consume. If you eat tuna, clams, scallops, or mahi mahi, you are benefiting from the abundance of phytoplankton in the ocean. The krill that are the primary source of food for whales depend on phytoplankton as well.

The point is simply this: There is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the proposal by the EPA will add more. The Earth doesn’t care a horse’s patoot about energy dominance. Those who worship in the temple of fossil fuels are making the Earth unfit for human habitation — that’s the long and short of it. That’s something to consider when your government promotes more pollution rather than less.

A Holy War On Science

We are done asking people to spare a thought about their children and grandchildren. That argument clearly carries no weight in the minds of MAGAlomanics. There is only one way to hold polluters in check, and that is by making them pay for the harm they do. Everything else is just empty words and failed hopes. Putting a price on carbon and methane pollution is the only way forward.

We can also throw bums like Lee Zeldin out of government and replace them with people who are not apostles for the fossil fuel companies. These are people who would happily gouge their eyes and pour boiling hot oil in the ears to keep from learning anything about how human activity is altering Nature. If they get their way, lots of people will die prematurely and future generations may never be born. What is astonishing is how comfortable they, and so many others, are with that.