EPA plans to raise your health costs by $120B on Monday

The EPA plans to announce a new policy that would remove limits on greenhouse gas pollution from coal and gas power plants. Those limits, put in place under the Obama and Biden administrations, were projected to save Americans $120 billion in health costs over the next two decades by reducing asthma attacks, emergency room visits, missed school and work days, and premature deaths. Rolling them back would erase those savings and raise health costs instead, though the EPA is not currently calculating or reporting those impacts as part of its policy decisions.

This move is part of a broader pattern of federal energy policy changes that tend to raise costs for households, including a separate rollback of fuel efficiency standards estimated to add $1.4 trillion in costs and raise gas prices, along with subsidies directed toward coal power. Courts have blocked some of these efforts before, and legal challenges to this power plant rule are likely, though outcomes have been mixed in the past on greenhouse gas cases.

For your own house, the direct effect isn't yet clear. Coal plants are still not being newly built regardless of this rule, since they remain costly compared with wind and solar. But easing pollution rules on gas plants could make it cheaper and faster to build the gas plants increasingly used to power data centers, which have already been pushing electricity prices up in some areas. Whether that translates into higher bills or health costs where you live will depend on your local grid and state policies, which are worth checking directly.