EPA Says Power Plant Carbon Emissions Aren’t Dangerous. Scientists Disagree.

"WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday proposed a new ruling that heat-trapping carbon gas “emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.’'

The Associated Press asked 30 different scientists, experts in climate, health and economics, about the scientific reality behind this proposal. Nineteen of them responded, all saying that the proposal was scientifically wrong and many of them called it disinformation. Here’s what eight of them said.

“This is the scientific equivalent to saying that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the temperature monitoring group Berkeley Earth. “The relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperatures has been well established since the late 1800s, and coal burning is the single biggest driver of global CO2 emissions, followed by oil and gas. It is utterly nonsensical to say that carbon emissions from power plants do not contribute significantly to climate change.”"

Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press June 11, 2025.

Source: AP, 06/12/2025