Donald Trump’s administration today proposed to repeal the Endangerment Finding for power plants – a move that would permanently strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas power plants under the Clean Air Act. This action would remove one of the EPA’s most powerful tools for combating climate change. Combined with the administration’s February repeal of the Endangerment Finding for motor vehicles, today’s proposal is part of a sweeping effort to dismantle the legal foundation for federal climate regulation, leaving the EPA legally unable to act on the two largest sources of carbon pollution in the country.
North Carolina ranked 12th in the country for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in 2025, totalling 41,436,664 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of 9,665,320 gasoline-powered vehicles driven for one year or 229,710 railcars worth of coal burned. It would take 685,158,802 tree seedlings to grow for ten years just to sequester the carbon dioxide released by North Carolina power plants in 2025 alone.
“From the mountains to the coast, North Carolinians value the outdoors in so many different ways, but climate change impacts are making that harder each year and burning fossil fuels is hurting us,” said Mikaela Curry, Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign Manager in North Carolina. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for people who care about our home and shared environment to engage and tell the EPA that it must stop this effort now and work with us for a liveable planet, not against us.”
The proposal is another one of Donald Trump’s attempts to bolster the profits of a struggling coal industry and deliver directly on the promises EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made to the corporate executives at a National Coal Council meeting in July, where he vowed to fulfill the industry’s “wish list.” The administration has already given more than $700 million in taxpayer dollars to the coal industry, despite the immense public and environmental harms associated with burning coal for electricity, and the well-documented evidence that renewable energy is now cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable than fossil fuels.
The handouts and regulatory giveaways come as renewable energy continues to outperform coal in the marketplace. In May, solar energy generated more electricity than coal across the entire country. The coal industry cannot compete with solar—it’s being kept on life support by taxpayer subsidies and regulatory handouts, while ordinary families pay the price in higher electricity bills, dirtier air, and more extreme weather fueled by carbon pollution.
“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting," said Sierra Club Chief Program Officer Holly Bender. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public. The Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”
Background
The Endangerment Finding is a 2009 scientific determination by the EPA that greenhouse gasses pose a significant threat to public health and the environment. It is the legal cornerstone of the EPA’s authority to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act – the foundation upon which vehicle standards, power plant rules, and other climate protections have all been built. The nonpartisan National Academies of Sciences confirmed last year that the finding “was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence.”
The Sierra Club has been at the forefront of the fight for federal climate standards longer than any other organization. In December 2002, the Club filed the first-ever climate case under the Clean Air Act in federal court, which ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gas pollution and to all of the federal climate standards that followed. Now, two-and-a-half decades later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are trying to destroy those hard-won victories in an effort to double-down on the fossil fuels that are harming the climate and environment, and driving up costs.