Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.

Why is that notable?

Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?

Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

define 'climate pollution', this is all fine and well until they apply it to nuclear shielding.

I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.

The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.

The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.

There’s no denying Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.

Funny how that happens.

Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.

Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?

A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.

You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.

Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.

Energy storage is required along with solar farms.

Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".

Energy storage is required along with solar farms

How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.

Fear really IS the mindkiller! Stop being afraid and start educating yourself. You are on HN, you are supposed to be smart.

Smart people understand pragmatism, which means not throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of ill thought-out feel-good measures.

There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.

Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors

Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?

Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.

It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.

All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals

China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.

And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up.

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...

(Page 14)

Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!

China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.

With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.

Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.

is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point?

China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.

Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.

Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...

China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...

The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039.

- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge

This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.

Good to see some action away from "climate" regulations ruining the energy sector and making everything downstream more expensive. You can't have a booming industrial economy without cheap energy. And no, having strict regulations that just end up moving production offshore doesn't solve anything. It just moves to pollution to China or India or whatever.

I don't see the point of trying to redefine "pollution" to include CO2. We have been discussing climate change for decades, but it was only recently that people tried to shoehorn CO2 into category of "pollution." It just takes a category where society has some consensus and then shoehorns some new disputed idea into existing category. It's an end-run around the process of building consensus around the new thing.

The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists CO₂ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).

That page is from 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...

I'm talking about redefining the term "pollution," not the term "greenhouse gas."

Carbon dioxide atmospheric pollution has been acknowledged since literally the 1800s. What era are you from? Are you 200 years old?

Did we call it “pollution” back then or something else? That is, did we lump CO2 conceptually into the same category as soot from coal plants and things like that?

Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.

IPCC first report was 1990, and the basic arithmetic of the atmosphere goes even further back.

This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".

There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition.

Source?

You need a source showing you that greenhouses gasses aren't pollution?

The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?

I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.

In the 1990 IPCC report it talks about “greenhouse gasses” and also about “air pollution” but treats those as two distinct things: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a.... For example, on page 97, it says “CO2 enrichment” may “enhance plant growth,” but that “enhanced levels of air pollution could also reduce this positive effect.” There’s it’s clearly talking about CO2 and air pollution as two different things that have opposite effects on plant growth.

Is the IPCC also “morons?”

Do you have zero critical thinking skills?

CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.

Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.

In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?

Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.

NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.

For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].

So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.

Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.

So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.

Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

There are a multitude of arguments against this:

- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.

- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?

- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.

- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.

- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.

This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.

The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.

Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.

At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.

This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.

you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.

"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"

Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.

The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.

I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s