By admin 
TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back greenhouse gas emission limits for power plants. The EPA made the announcement Monday, saying the action would save more than $300 billion and bring down American energy costs.
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What the rollback means for Arizona
The EPA is repealing a 2024 Biden-era rule requiring power plants to control the amount of pollution they create through carbon capture equipment. The EPA also proposed eliminating other greenhouse gas emission rules, claiming they have no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions from power plants at all. Experts say the move could affect public health in Pima County.
Zealan Hoover, a former Senior Advisor to the EPA Administrator, said that initial regulatory efforts were designed to address climate change and improve public health.
“When EPA finalized this regulation back in 2024, the agency calculated that the standards would prevent 1,200 deaths every year and hundreds of thousands of asthma incidents a year,” Hoover said.
With this action, he said it’s estimated that tens of thousands of people could die from pollution-related causes.
“We’re not going to benefit from those public health savings. In fact, we’re going to be more exposed to asthma attacks, and other heart and lung diseases, and even death,” Hoover said.
Ozone levels in Pima County
According to the American Lung Association, Pima County received a failing score for high levels of ozone pollution. Ground-level ozone, also known as smog, is primarily caused by car and power plant emissions and made worse by excessive heat.
Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University, said the new order could increase air pollution in Arizona and across the country.
“What this does is this wipes out a number of rules that would’ve required new gas plants to be cleaner, so we could see more pollution from those new gas plants than we otherwise would have seen,” Cohan said.
Pima County’s two major power plants are gas-powered, but one of three coal-powered plants left in the state is located in Cochise County. Hoover said those existing gas-powered plants didn’t fall under previous EPA guidelines, but new ones would have.
“Particularly with all the increased electric demand from data centers, we’re seeing a lot of additional gas-fired generation be built in Arizona and across the country,” Hoover said. “Under these new regulations the EPA has put forward, new gas-powered plants that are being built today in Arizona and across the country would never be held to a standard for their carbon emissions.”
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EPA cites cost savings
According to the EPA’s announcement, deregulation will save billions of dollars and increase energy reliability. The agency also said any potential public health harms are “too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector,” and that it is “out of its scope to regulate.”
However, Hoover said the cost to public health is clear.
“Americans know that climate change is harming their health, costing them money, and EPA is trying to pretend that that is not the case so that they can ram through these regulatory rollbacks,” Hoover said.
ADEQ’s response
In response to questions about the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality’s role in monitoring air pollution, ADEQ said ground-level ozone in southern Arizona continues to be strictly regulated.
“While federal shifts regarding greenhouse gas regulations affect carbon rules for power plant operations, separate state and federal regulations controlling conventional air pollutants remain fully in place,” a spokesperson for ADEQ wrote in an email to 13 News.
They said their air monitoring network across southern Arizona has not changed and continues to stay focused on improving overall air quality.
13 News also reached out to Tucson Electric Power about the EPA’s announcement. Their full statement is below:
“Although we’re reviewing the EPA’s announcement, we don’t anticipate it will significantly impact our long-term resource planning. TEP is working toward finalizing our 2026 Integrated Resource Plan, which outlines how we expect to meet customers’ energy needs over the next 15 years through continual assessment of evolving regulations, market conditions, costs and technologies. TEP will continue to monitor the impacts of regulatory changes on long-range plans and remains focused on providing reliable and affordable service while pursuing our aspirational goal of net zero direct greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” wrote Joe Barrios, a spokesperson for TEP.
For more information about ozone pollution and how to protect yourself, visit the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality’s website.
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