Former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama made promises to “follow the science” when setting climate policies. However, since Donald Trump took office, it’s been revealed that previous administrations sometimes shaped science to fit their preferred policies or ignored it when it didn’t align with their goals.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration completed a study on liquefied natural gas exports but ignored its findings because they didn’t align with their climate agenda.
Emails from the Obama-era EPA in 2009 suggest the agency had already decided on carbon dioxide regulations before announcing their findings, raising questions about the political motivation behind their decisions.
The Biden-Harris administration allegedly hid comments that challenged its Clean Power Plan 2.0 rule (CPP2), currently under Trump administration review. The EPA sought comments from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) on carbon capture technology, but these comments were scrubbed from records.
The CPP2 requires coal plants to install carbon capture technology by 2039 and natural gas-fired plants by 2032. Experts argue these rules may increase electricity costs and destabilize the grid by discouraging reliable power sources like coal and natural gas.
According to documents obtained by Just the News, the EPA sought NETL’s comments on the proposed rule, which were released for public comment in May.
In December, Representative James Comer wrote to the EPA Administrator, seeking names of those who provided feedback on the CPP2 draft. These comments, according to Comer, cast significant doubt on the rule’s viability. The proposed rule allowed for hydrogen and carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) to meet emissions standards, but neither technology was deemed viable by some experts.
Hydrogen was removed from the rule in April 2024, but carbon capture remained, despite concerns about its cost. An unnamed NETL author noted that “CCUS remains prohibitively expensive even after funds or tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Comments disputing CCUS’s adequacy went further than Comer’s letter, as watchdog group Government Oversight and Accountability (GOA) filed a FOIA request for NETL engineers’ comments.
The EPA’s determination that CCUS was “adequately demonstrated” relied on a Canadian coal plant project known as Boundary Dam Unit #3 (BD3). A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis called BD3 an “under-performing failure,” capturing far less than the promised 90% of emissions. NETL engineers argued that BD3’s performance was misconstrued as successful, and it should not serve as a credible basis for emissions reduction.
NETL engineers further commented that BD3 only met the 90% target briefly over eight years, failing to meet emissions standards consistently. These comments were allegedly sanitized and excluded from the official record. Chris Horner, an environment and energy policy attorney, suggested that the EPA might have buried these comments.
Evidence suggests the EPA lacked confidence in CCUS technology’s capabilities, as revealed by House Oversight Committee findings. In May 2024, two dozen states filed a lawsuit against related EPA rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) later supported the lawsuit, citing the EPA’s own modeling, which showed limited confidence in carbon capture.
The EPA’s Integrated Planning Model projected no addition of carbon capture to natural gas units through 2055. It also forecasted no new coal units with carbon capture during this period. The modeling document indicated that only one gigawatt of existing coal capacity would continue operating.
