Full Title: The Scale of Significance: Power Plants
Author(s): Peter H. Howard and Jason A. Schwartz
Publisher(s): Institute for Policy Integrity
Publication Date: May 26, 2025
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The Trump Administration is openly questioning the significance of U.S. contributions to climate change, playing down U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as contributing only “some mysterious amount above zero to climate change.”
According to a leaked draft of a proposed regulatory repeal, Trump’s EPA will compare the U.S. power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions to worldwide totals and find, judged on that relative scale, the sector’s contribution to climate change is neither “significant” nor “meaningful.” That kind of skewed appraisal would produce the reductio ad absurdum under which no U.S. sector, sliced thinly enough, is ever a significant source of greenhouse gases—a clearly irrational outcome.
By any measure, emissions from major U.S. industries like the electric power sector contribute significantly to climate damages. The best available evidence shows that each year of greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. coal-fired and gas-fired power plants will contribute to climate damages responsible for thousands of U.S. deaths and hundreds of billions in economics harms.