"Litigation over the EPA’s rollback of Biden-era power plant emission rules will likely put the Trump administration in the position of poking holes in a technology it has, at other times, incentivized and promoted.
The dispute over carbon capture and sequestration could also rehash highly technical, often speculative financial arguments that have been tabled before — except this time with the government arguing the technology isn’t economically feasible, rather than that it is, as the Biden administration did.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent final rule unwinds a 2024 standard that required coal and new natural gas-fired power plants to dramatically cut their carbon emissions. Under the 2024 rule, the agency said carbon capture and sequestration — capturing and storing releases from burning coal rather than letting them escape into the air — was the best technology for plants to reduce emissions.
But carbon capture doesn’t meet the Clean Air Act’s definition of “best system of emissions reduction,” which requires that a technology be both effective at cutting emissions and available at a cost that doesn’t bring on extreme economic hardship, said Matthew Leopold, who served as EPA general counsel in the first Trump administration."
Stephen Lee reports for Bloomberg Environment September 25, 2026.
