The EPA: Let’s forget about climate change
President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency “is ready to make polluters great again,” said Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com. EPA director Lee Zeldin said he’ll cancel 31 environmental regulations, declaring it “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history,” while Trump vowed to promote the opening of “hundreds” of coal-fired power plants. Coal produces far more pollutants than other energy sources and was being rapidly phased out, but in a social media post, Trump called coal “BEAUTIFUL” and “CLEAN.”
Instead of curbing pollution and combating climate change, Zeldin said, the agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.” Policies being scaled back or repealed include rules on greenhouse gas emissions. More than 1,100 staff scientists are being fired; environmental justice offices, which enforce laws helping poor and minority communities, are being shuttered; and the agency will no longer consider the costs of climate disasters in its policies.
These “deeply misguided actions” will grant businesses “a new license to pollute” and “speed up the clock on the planet becoming unlivable.” Zeldin is actually righting “an environmental wrong,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. The most important of his policy changes is the reversal of the Obama administration’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which enabled the federal government to cite the Clean Air Act as legal justification for regulating greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide from energy plants, cars and trucks, household appliances, and gas exploration. That policy—which Zeldin called “the holy grail of the climate change religion”—gave the EPA enormous regulatory authority over the economy and imposed enormous costs on businesses. Zeldin “is amply justified in chipping away at its legacy.”
You’ll miss the EPA when it’s been gutted, said former EPA heads William K. Reilly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Gina McCarthy in The New York Times. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the agency helped clean the nation’s waterways and air, replace lead pipes and asbestos, reduce acid rain, and remove toxins and nuclear waste from “the nation’s most contaminated lands.” It also fought to protect poor people whose neighborhoods took the brunt of pollution from power plants, garbage incinerators, refineries, and factories, said Zoë Schlanger in The Atlantic. Now the EPA is being dismantled—and “more Americans will be left sicker and will die sooner.”