Good news, everyone! Carbon pollution has been solved — from the fossil fuel industry’s point of view.

On Monday, at a G20 summit branded “Energy Abundance“, the EPA finalized the repeal of the 2024 rule that required the country’s coal and new gas plants to capture most of their carbon. The EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, called this the largest power-sector deregulatory action in history and put the price of freedom at $310 billion in “savings.”

Then, for good measure, it proposed dropping every remaining power-plant carbon limit, on a bold new legal theory: America’s power plants may be the second-biggest carbon source in the country, but since climate change is global, pinning any actual health harms on the industry that does more to cause it than any other is — in the EPA’s own phrasing — “uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted.”

Here’s what that $310 billion of “savings” leaves out.

The scrapped rule would have prevented about 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma attacks by 2035. EPA’s own paperwork cheerfully expects coal burning to climb more than tenfold. By one analysis, the rollbacks set America’s emissions cuts back a full decade.

That’s not savings. That’s cost-shifting from the polluters to the American public’s health.

And it fits a pattern that’s getting hard to miss. This year alone, the same EPA has exempted more than 180 polluting plants from Clean Air Act limits.  All the polluters had to do was send an email requesting a waiver. No review by regulators. Just a rubber stamp.

The same goes for pollution from 700,000 aging oil and gas wells that account for roughly half the industry’s methane. The justifications vary, but the fossil fuel industry always wins at the expense of the American people.

But that’s not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.

For starters, the courts will get their say. Blue states and environmental groups are already lining up to challenge the repeal. States keep their own authority, too. So no rollback in Washington can stop California, New York, or anyone else from holding their plants to a higher standard.

And the grand plan to wipe out power-plant carbon rules forever is still just a proposal — one that comes with a 45-day comment period and a public hearing. Every comment we make becomes something the agency has to answer for.

The industry is hoping we’re too worn down to notice.  We’re not.

Let’s notice. Loudly.