It Will Take Years - YEARS - To Undo Shitstain's Destruction Of Environmental Policy

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Notwithstanding President Trump’s claims to want “crystal clean water and the cleanest and the purest air on the planet,” his administration has determinedly gone about reversing at least 100 environmental rules. While initial Trump EPA cutbacks under Administrator Scott Pruitt were hampered by his self-inflicted scandals, the agency under Administrator Andrew Wheeler has quietly worked to achieve many of the same ends. Wheeler’s environmentalist critics are fond of saying that he is “so bad because he is so good at being bad,” thereby often avoiding incriminating headlines that had plagued Pruitt. The extensive regulatory cutbacks raise questions about how much long-term damage they might pose to air and water quality and to serious efforts to address climate change. With a presidential election now five months away, they also raise “What if…” questions about whether such cutbacks might be sustained or how quickly they might be reversed by a new administration.

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Under an earlier landmark Supreme Court decision (Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007), EPA is legally required to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant once it concluded that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health via climate change. As a result, the Trump administration could not simply scrap the Clean Power Plan, but rather was required to replace it. Under Weaver, the Trump EPA did that with the dramatically weaker Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which essentially requires fossil fuel power plants to increase their efficiency rather than mandating that they meet specific carbon dioxide emission levels. Because challenges to the erstwhile Clean Power Plan were not resolved through litigation, tackling power sector emissions is expected to be a lengthy and more difficult for a new Democratic administration than transportation emissions, for which the CAFE standards are already established. Doing so would require drafting, proposing, and finalizing a new plan to replace the Trump ACE rule. History teaches that such an effort unquestionably would lead to a whole new set of legal challenges, and therefore to more delay and uncertainty.

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What leading professional scientific organizations and environmental advocates call the “secret science rule” would limit EPA to using in its rulemaking only research for which the underlying data can be replicated or made available for “independent analysis.” That has a benign and even reasonable sound to it, but many health studies rely on confidential information, or on one-time events like a major oil spill that cannot be replicated. Critics say the real goal of the proposed rule is to vastly limit the health research available to EPA scientists, to the benefit of polluting industries. The agency’s own Science Advisory Board – two-thirds of whose current members have been appointed by the Trump administration – sharply criticized the agency’s efforts to weaken environmental regulations, including via the secret science rule. The board noted that the proposed rule would give the EPA administrator “license to politicize the scientific evaluation required” and would “result in the exclusion of much of the scientific literature from consideration.”

Union of Concerned Scientists research director Gretchen Goldman has said the rule would especially restrict use of studies that show the need for air pollution protections, such as ambient air quality standards for nitrogen oxides, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. EPA is in the process of reviewing 76,000 public comments on the rule. Assuming it succeeds in finalizing the rule prior to the Trump administration’s leaving office, any new administration would have to engage in the several-year rulemaking process to reverse the move.

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https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/most-trump-environmental-rollbacks-will-take-years-to-be-reversed/