WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Trump administration officials announced a plan to remove the existing pollution caps placed on power plants in the United States, changing a longtime policy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and threatening to increase the level of greenhouse gases pumped into our atmosphere.
U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, senior member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, made the following statement:
“Rolling back carbon pollution limits from power plants is a step in the wrong direction. Rather than abandoning public health standards and the fight against climate change, the way to keep electricity prices down is to invest in cleaner, more efficient energy technologies.”
In the United States, the power sector is already the second-largest producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, behind only the transportation sector.
According to data recently released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), July 2026 was the hottest on record for the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature of 76.9*F – a full 3.3*F hotter than the 20th century average, and the hottest in 132 years of record keeping. Climate change is already costing American consumers, with one study published earlier this year finding U.S. households paying an average of $400 to $900 more per year because of climate change, and more than $1,300 in some parts of the country.
Sen. Cantwell has been a strong advocate of polices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions across multiple sectors and industries. As then-chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, she secured $297 million for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel and Low-Emissions Aviation Technology Grant Program, now known as the Fueling Aviation’s Sustainable Transition (FAST) program, which was enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. She also partnered with her Senate colleagues to introduce the Sustainable Skies Act in 2019, a version of which was also incorporated in the Inflation Reduction Act to provide a tax credit to increase the supply of sustainable aviation fuel.
In 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report requested by Sen. Cantwell and U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) on the economic impacts of climate change to the federal government. The report identified six key sectors of great financial risk to the federal government due to the projected impacts of climate change: crop insurance, coastal disaster relief, health care expenditures, wildland fire suppression, flood insurance, and sea level rise. The GAO warned that changes in the first four sectors would cost the federal government an estimated $18 billion annually by midcentury and nearly $69 billion annually by late century.
In 2023, Sen. Cantwell joined Sen. Collins in introducing the bipartisan Carbon Removal and Emissions Storage Technologies (CREST) Act, which would direct the Departments of Energy and Interior to establish new research programs and evaluate the feasibility of carbon removal and storage pathways, quantify the net impact of carbon removal solutions, and establish an innovative pilot reverse auction purchasing program to accelerate carbon removal market commercialization. The CREST Act followed the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, introduced in 2009, which would set up a mechanism for selling carbon shares to fuel producers and would return most of the resulting revenue in checks to every American.
In 2020, she pushed back against President Trump’s rollback of fuel efficiency standards, which would eliminate clean car standards: “Injecting uncertainty into the economy with this short-sighted action will degrade public health, pollute our environment, and negatively impact job growth,” Sen. Cantwell said.