How Abrupt U-Turns Are Defining U.S. Environmental Regulations

The Biden administration’s move on Thursday to strictly limit pollution from coal-burning power plants is a major policy shift. But in many ways it’s one more hairpin turn in a zigzag approach to environmental regulation in the United States, a pattern that has grown more extreme as the political landscape has become more polarized.

Nearly a decade ago, President Barack Obama was the Democrat who tried to force power plants to stop burning coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. His Republican successor, Donald J. Trump, effectively reversed that plan. Now President Biden is trying once more to put an end to carbon emissions from coal plants. But Mr. Trump, who is running to replace Mr. Biden, has promised that he will again delete those plans if he wins in November.

The country’s participation in the Paris climate accord has followed the same swerving path: Under Mr. Obama, the United States joined the global commitment to fight climate change, only for Mr. Trump to pull the U.S. out of it, and for Mr. Biden to rejoin. If Mr. Trump wins the presidency, he is likely to exit the accord. Again.

Government policies have always shifted between Democratic and Republican administrations, but they have generally stayed in place and have been tightened or loosened along a spectrum, depending on the occupant of the White House.

But in the last decade, environmental rules in particular have been caught in a cycle of erase-and-replace whiplash.

“In the old days, the regulatory days of my youth, we were going back and forth between the 40-yard lines,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who directed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and now runs the American Action Forum, a conservative research organization. “Now, it’s back and forth between the 10-yard lines. They do it and undo it and do it and undo it.”