Washington (AP) – Three former managers of the environmental protection authority sounded an alarm on Friday, which was proposed by the EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, endangered the lives of millions of Americans and gave up the agency’s double mission to protect the environment and human health.
Zeldin said on Wednesday that he is planning to reset 31 essential environmental rules for everything, from neat air to neat water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy described Zeldin’s announcement “the most catastrophic day in EPA history.” “
The warning of McCarthy, which served under two democratic administrations, was repeated by two former EPA ladders, which served among Republican President.
Zeldin’s comprehensive plan to reverse decades of regulations was nothing less than a “catastrophe” and “is the task of a long history of the EPA campaigns to protect the environment, said William K. Reilly, who led the agency under President George HW Bush a key role in changing the Clean Air Act 1990.
“What this administration does is our entire life – our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under President George W. Bush.
Whitman referred to one of the most essential measures that Zeldin announced: to rethink a scientific statement that the planet warming power gas endangers public health and well-being. The determination of the agency from 2009 was the legal underpinning of most US climate change, including regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other sources of pollution.
Environmentalists and climate researchers refer to the risk of finding a foundation of the US law, and say that every attempt to undo this has little chance of success.
Whitman and the other former agency leaders said that they were stunned that the Trump government would even try to reverse the statement and a enormous number of other long -term rules for the agency. When approved, the rules of the rules could cause “serious damage” for the environment, public health and the economy, they said.
“This EPA administrator now seems to do the offer of the fossil fuel industry more than follow the mission of the EPA,” said McCarthy, who led the agency under President Barack Obama and was a top consultant of President Joe Biden.
McCarthy and the other retired guides emphasized that environmental protection and economic prosperity do not exclude each other, and that robust regulations have made it possible for both a cleaner environment and a growing economy since the agency was founded 55 years ago.
The EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said President Donald Trump “advanced preservation and environmental responsibility and, during his first term, promotes economic growth for families across the country” and will continue to do so during this term. “
Trump, who described climate change as a joke, has thrown back more than 100 environmental laws in his first term as President. He sat down for a promise to promise “drills, baby, drill”, and swore to facilitate regulations for companies with fossil fuels. During his current term, he frozen donations for climate machines and other environmental editions, released scientists who worked for the national weather service and reduced the support of the federal energy for renewable energies.
Reilly said that he was afraid that Zeldin and Trump, influenced by billionaire Elon Musk and his authority for the government cutting edge, would return to a time before the EPA when the industry polluted free upheaval as desired and to fill the air in many cities with threatening smog and rivers with industrial waste.
“I wonder if the painting factors will give us more burning rivers,” said Reilly. The comment was an indication of a notorious incident in 1969, in which Cleveland’s Cuyahoga river caught a fire and a year later during the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon, the Federation of the Federation and the Creation of the EPA caught.
Last month, the former EPA administrators published an op-ET in the New York Times before the likely environmental damage, since the Trump administration is funded that shorten the expenditure and fires more than a thousand employees. In a statement on Friday, they said that the plan to reverse the environmental regulations “put the country on a course that will irreparably damage the Americans, companies and environmental protection nationwide”.
Regulations are tough to make – said McCarthy on purpose. “They are difficult. They take a lot of effort, which is why I think most of us scratch our heads, why we really want to rethink what basically worked. “
At the announcement of the rules of the rule, Zeldin said, Trump officers “drive a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion and introduce the golden age of America. ”
Changes include plans to rewrite a rule in which air pollution caused by fossil fireplace plants and a separate measure to restrict the emissions of cars and trucks. Zeldin and the Republican President incorrectly characterize the author rules as an electric vehicle “mandate”.
The democratic administration of biden had stated that the rules for power plant strength would reduce environmental pollution and improve public health and at the same time support the reliable, long -term supply of electricity that America needs. Biden, which made the fight against climate change an upper priority of his presidency, undertook that half of all fresh cars and trucks sold in the USA will decrease zero by 2030.
The EPA will also aim to limit rules that restrict the industrial pollution of mercury and other air toys, soot pollution and a “good neighbor” rule, which are intended to restrict the smoke stacks, which burden the areas with smog against the wind. Zeldin also aimed at a neat water law that offers federal protection for rivers, streams and wetlands.
When approved according to a lengthy process that contains public comments, the measures of the measures of the regulatory costs and “hidden taxes” will eliminate trillion dollars, said Zeldin, reducing living costs for American families and reducing prices for the basics such as the purchase of a car, heating their house and the operation of a company.
Environmentalists have sworn to combat the changes that a group said that this would lead to “the greatest increase in environmental pollution in decades” in the United States
