EPA moves to dismantle dozens of environmental rules

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This report is being placed in "Other Investing" because the changes being described will have potentially serious impact on many aspects of the American economy.

Following are excerpts from a current report in The Washington Post:

The agency announced Wednesday that it will begin the process of dismantling dozens of rules for electric vehicles, power plants, clean water and more.

In a flurry of news releases, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency will roll back some of President Joe Biden’s most consequential climate and environmental regulations. He specifically cited rules aimed at speeding the nation’s shift to electric vehicles, slashing planet-warming emissions from power plants and safeguarding waterways from harmful pollution.

Taken together, the announcements herald a seismic shift in U.S. environmental policy, one that could ease restrictions on nearly every sector of the economy. Yet rewriting many of the rules could take the agency months or even years.

“Today is the most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” Zeldin wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”

Zeldin confirmed in the piece that the Trump administration will repeal a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change. The Washington Post first reported last month that the administration will target the “endangerment finding,” which cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Environmentalists criticized the EPA’s actions Wednesday: “Corporate polluters are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA just handed them a free pass to spew unlimited climate pollution, consequences be damned,” Charles Harper, the power sector senior policy lead at the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, said in a statement.

Business groups cheered the moves, with coal advocates specifically praising the reconsideration of the power plant rules, which would have pushed all coal plants by 2039 to either capture their carbon dioxide emissions or shut down.

“The standard is so extreme that it’s virtually impossible to comply with,” Ernie Thrasher, CEO of the coal supplier XCoal Energy and Resources, said in an interview. “It’s the consumers who have been strangled with regulation.”

Note: Text emphasis was added to the above report.

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And more: excerpts from a current report in The Guardian:

Trump officials to reconsider whether greenhouse gases cause harm amid climate rollbacks- Activists horrified as EPA reverses pollution laws and reviews landmark finding that gases harm public health

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a supreme court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.

Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics”.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas”.

Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term. “The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

“Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

The EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.

The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles, consider weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that’s linked to an array of health problems, potentially axe requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste and will consider further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.

The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.

Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.

“Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”

And from The New York Times:

In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.

Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.