EPA tilts away from Americans, toward businesses

The first two years of the Trump administration have seen a parade of actions that promise to degrade the environment, and in some cases have already. The latest move is particularly pernicious.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to weaken the rule that limits mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. That would be bad enough, given the damage mercury can inflict on children and fetuses. But the way the EPA wants to alter the rule is even worse. It wants to change the way it weighs the costs and benefits of such regulations to ignore certain health benefits. The proposal, if adopted, would make it more difficult to justify any environmental rule that keeps people safer and healthier if the cost to business to adopt it would outweigh the benefits for people.

This would be a win for the coal industry and, especially, coal magnate Robert Murray, a big Donald Trump donor who personally asked for a mercury rule rollback. And, wouldn’t you know it, Murray once employed acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler when Wheeler was a coal lobbyist.

So far, the Trump administration has blocked, delayed or signaled for repeal nearly 80 Obama-era regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency — which might as well be called the Industrial Protection Agency — has undermined a plan to reduce power-plant carbon-dioxide emissions and wants to weaken a rule mandating an increase in the fuel economy of cars. With its partner-in-degradation, the Interior Department — whose acting head, David Bernhardt, is a former oil industry lobbyist — the EPA has begun to roll back Obama-era proposals to limit emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. A rule that would result in no more new coal-fired power plants has been targeted, and restrictions on drilling for oil and natural gas have been eliminated or weakened.

The problem isn’t only what these changes mean for the fight against climate change. They are affecting people today. Like California farmworkers being sickened by the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, which continues to be sprayed after an Obama-era ban about to take effect was quashed. Like residents of West Virginia, whose polluted rivers and streams were to be cleaned and protected until Obama-era restrictions were blocked or delayed. Like neighbors in a cancer-ridden Indianapolis suburb fighting attempts to weaken restrictions on trichloroethylene, the component of a carcinogenic plume spreading under their houses and releasing vapors into their homes.

With mercury, the process of cutting it also reduces soot, nitrogen oxide, arsenic, chromium, nickel and particle pollution. The Obama administration calculated the additional savings at $37 billion to $90 billion annually by preventing up to 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks. Now the EPA is saying it isn’t appropriate to factor in those extra benefits, tilting the cost-benefit analysis to business.

The rule is subject to public comment. If finalized, it seems bound for a court battle. But it’s a public health train wreck perpetrated on behalf of big business and campaign donors. — The editorial board