Washington (AP)-The Environmental Protection Agency proposed the cancellation of rules on Wednesday, which restrict the greenhouse gas emissions fueled by coal and natural gas from power plants. A measure that administrator Lee Zeldin said would remove the cost of industry billions of dollars for industry and “dismiss” American energy.
The EPA also proposed to weaken regulation in which power plants have to reduce the emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants that can damage the development of the brain of tiny children and contribute to heart attacks and other health problems in adults.
The rollbacks are intended to fulfill the repeated promise of Republican President Donald Trump, to “unleash American energy” and to make it more affordable to the Americans, to operate their houses and to operate companies.
If they were approved and final, the plans would reverse the efforts of the administration of democratic president Joe Biden to tackle climate change and to improve the conditions in areas that are heavily stressed by industrial pollution, mainly in black and Hispanic communities with low income and majority.
The rules for power plant plants belong to 30 environmental regulations, which Zeldin aimed at in March, when he described the following day of deregulation in American history.
On Wednesday, Zeldin said that the up-to-date rules would support end what he called the bid and Obama administration “war against so much of our US -Inland energy supply”.
“The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November,” he added in a speech in the Epa headquarters. “They wanted to ensure that … no matter which agency someone is confirmed to lead to leading ways to reduce common sense, pragmatic solutions that reduce the cost of living and create jobs and create a golden ERA era-era-era-era-era-era-era-era-era of the American well-being.”
Environmental and public health groups described the rollbacks dangerously and have sworn themselves to question the rules in court.
Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician and executive director of the consortium of the Medical Society on Climate & Health, described the suggestions as “another in a series of attacks” by the Trump government about “health, our children, our climate and the basic idea of ​​clean air and water”.
She called it “incomprehensible to believe that our country would move after somewhat common sense as the protection of children from mercury and our planet before worsening hurricanes, forest fires, floods and poor air quality that are powered by climate change”.
“Ignoring the immense damage to public health through the pollution of the power plants is a clear violation of the law,” added Manish Bapna, President and CEO of the Defense Council for Natural Resources.
The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $ 275 billion each year, which indeed comes into force. This emerges from an Associated Press examination that contained the earlier reviews of the agency and a wide range of other research.
It is by no means guaranteed that the rules will be completely eliminated – they cannot be changed without carrying out a federal regulatory process that can take years and requires public comments and scientific justification.
Even a partial dismantling of the rules would lead to more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead – and in particular tinier particles in the air that can submit to lungs and cause health problems, as the AP analysis found. It would also mean higher emissions of greenhouse gases and the warming of the earth would drive to more fatal levels.
Biden, a democrat, had made the fight against climate change a license plate of his presidency. Coal-fired power plants should be forced to capture the Rauch-Stack emissions or to be closed under a strict EPA rule that was issued last year. The then EPA director Michael Regan said that the rules for power plant plants would reduce pollution and improve public health and at the same time support reliable, long-term power supply.
The electricity sector is the country’s second largest contribution to climate change after transport.
In its proposed ordinance, the Trump EPA argues that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel systems “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change and therefore do not meet threshold in the context of the tidy Air Act for regulatory measures. The greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas providers are “a small and decreasing part of the global emissions”, said the EPA and added: “The priority of this administration is to promote public health or well-being through energy and independence by using fossil fuels to generate electricity.”
The Clean Air Act enables the EPA to limit emissions by power plants and other industrial sources if these emissions contribute significantly to air pollution that endanger public health.
If fossil fuel systems no longer encounter the threshold of the EPA, the Trump government can later argue that other pollutants of other industrial sectors should not be regulated, said Meghan Greenfield, a former lawyer for EPA and Justice Ministry, who is currently in private practice in private practice.
The EPA proposal “has the potential to have much, much more broader effects,” she said.
Zeldin, a former New York congress member, said that the rules of the bid era are “require our economy to protect the environment” in order to “get out of existence” and let them “disappear”.
Rich Nolan, President and CEO of the National Mining Association, welcomed the up-to-date rules and said that they remove “deliberately unreachable standards” for tidy air, while “exposing the competitive conditions for reliable power sources instead of stacking the deck”.
Dr. Howard Frumkin, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health and emeritus professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said that Zeldin and Trump tried to deny reality.
“The world is round, the sun rises in the east, coal and gas power plants contribute significantly to climate change, and climate change increases the risk of heat waves, catastrophic storms and many other health threats,” said Frumkin. “These are undeniable facts. If you torpedo regulations for power plant-greenhouse gas emissions, you torpedo the health and well-being of the American public and contribute to leaving our children and grandchildren a world of risk and suffering.”
In a paper published in the magazine Science, it was found that the rules of bidea era could reduce carbon emissions of the US electricity sector by 73% to 86% below 2005 to 2040, compared to a reduction from 60% to 83% without the rules.
“The carbon emissions in the electricity sector are falling faster with the (bid-era) regulations than without them,” said Aaron Bergman, a scholarship holder in resources for the future, a non-profit research institution and co-author of the science paper. The bidges would also lead to “significant reduction in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, pollutants that affect human health”.
___
Michael Phillis and Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Writers, contributed to this story.
