No Material Impact

“Models continue to show that GHG emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change.” That’s the EPA’s actual sentence, in a press release finalizing the repeal of the 2024 carbon standards and proposing to erase whatever’s left. I’ve spent the morning reading actual climate models, and “models continue to show” is doing a lot of quiet work there. It’s the phrase you reach for when you want the authority of data without citing any. The real legal argument underneath is duller and more honest: Loper Bright killed the deference courts used to give agencies, the endangerment finding is already gone, so the EPA says it simply lacks authority to regulate greenhouse gases for climate reasons at all. That’s a jurisdictional claim. Dressing it up as a scientific one is the tell.

Meanwhile the actual reliability crisis this week has nothing to do with carbon. PJM’s own modeling, done for the Pennsylvania PUC, finds that if data center load keeps growing the way it’s growing, the grid’s loss-of-load expectation could run “over 100 times worse than PJM’s planning criterion”: more than 13 days a year with real loss-of-load events, not the fractional-day standard the whole system is built around. Nobody needed an emergency order or a repealed rule to get there. It’s just arithmetic, done honestly, and it’s scarier than anything in the EPA release.

One good thing to end on. A battery installation near San Antonio just went online built entirely out of retired EV batteries, 28 megawatt-hours of grid storage that started its working life failing to get someone to the office on time. Circularity, quietly, while everyone else argues about jurisdiction.