Trump EPA ends climate regulations for power plants

NEW: Trump's EPA moves to end federal climate regulations for power plants, scrapping one of the largest US efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

America just stopped regulating carbon from its power plants. All of it.

The EPA announced the final rule Monday at the G20 energy summit in Houston, scrapping the Biden-era mandate that forced coal and gas plants to capture their emissions or shut down by 2039. You can see the kind of plant we're talking about here, coal yards like this one in West Virginia.

Administrator Lee Zeldin calls it the largest power sector deregulatory action ever, worth 310 billion dollars in savings by the agency's own math. For scale, if America's power sector were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter on Earth.

And there's a second move that matters more. The EPA is also proposing to declare it has no authority over these emissions at all, which would tie the hands of every future administration. Environmental groups say lawsuits are coming immediately. They usually do, and this time the stakes are the whole rulebook.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.