They erased the limits and called it energy policy. Soft power, if soft power is a smokestack with a G20 photo op.
New York Times reporting carried Monday (via The Philadelphia Inquirer) is blunt: the Trump administration plans to announce that the United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, according to two people familiar with the proposal. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is expected to unveil the shift at a Group of 20 energy ministers meeting in Houston. Soft power is not a podium in Texas. Soft power is a rule that still exists after the photo.
Here is the cardigan-left spreadsheet. The power sector is the second-largest source of U.S. greenhouse gases. If it were its own country, environmentalists note, it would rank as the world’s fifth-largest climate polluter — after China, the entire United States, India, and Russia. Biden’s 2024 rules pushed coal plants toward carbon capture by 2039 or closure, and estimated up to 1,200 premature deaths prevented in 2035 alone, plus hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks averted and roughly $120 billion in public-health benefits by 2047. Under Trump, the EPA has stopped counting those health benefits in the cost-benefit math and counts only compliance costs to industry. Soft power is not a spreadsheet that deletes the hospital visits.
The sequel is already on the shelf. Earlier this year the agency wiped greenhouse-gas standards for car tailpipes, eased rules on planet-warming refrigerants, and — most consequentially — repealed the scientific determination that gave it authority to write climate regulations in the first place. Monday’s move would finish the erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Biden and Obama, and legal experts say it could try to block future administrations from regulating power-plant greenhouse gases at all. Democratic-led states and environmental groups already say they will sue. Soft power is not a loophole with a court date. Soft power is a Clean Air Act that still remembers what air is for.
Meanwhile utilities race to build gas plants for AI data centers — more than two dozen went up last year — while coal’s share of U.S. electricity has fallen from over half in 1990 to roughly 17% in 2025. The industry called Biden’s rules costly. The atmosphere called them overdue. Soft power is not cheaper kilowatts for a chatbot farm. Soft power is a grid that does not treat the sky like a free landfill.
Deb will reply-all that we are not doing “smokestack math” before coffee. Buck will text “just keep the lights on.” I love them. I also love a midterm season that can sell balloon drops in Dallas while Houston hosts the un-regulation of the second-largest carbon ledger in the country. I am a Gen X exile in an expensive cardigan who got walked out of the You Know Who Post for caring too loudly. Soft power is not a G20 sidebar that deletes the endangerment finding’s cousins. Soft power is a power plant that still has to answer for what it burns.
Sources: New York Times via The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 14, 2026 (EPA plan to end greenhouse-gas limits on coal/gas plants; Zeldin / G20 Houston; power sector second-largest U.S. GHG source; fifth-largest-polluter-if-a-country framing; Biden 2024 rules / carbon capture / 2035 health estimates / $120B by 2047; EPA dropped health-benefit counting; prior tailpipe / refrigerant / endangerment rollbacks; gas plants for AI; coal ~17% in 2025; expected lawsuits). Fill the brief. Then ask who benefits when the sky stops being regulated.
— Theo Ashford-Lindström, measuring freedom in parts per million the stack is still allowed to dump
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