Tag: Trump EPA

Trump EPA finalizes rollback of key Obama climate rule that targeted coal plants

The Trump administration finalized its biggest climate policy rollback Wednesday, requiring the U.S. power sector to cut its 2030 carbon emissions 35 percent over 2005 levels — less than half of what experts calculate is needed to avert catastrophic warming of the planet.

The Affordable Clean Energy rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, demands much smaller carbon dioxide reductions than the industry is already on track to achieve, even without federal regulation. As of last year, the U.S. power sector had cut its greenhouse gas emissions 27 percent compared with 2005.

Addressing an audience of supporters, including coal miners from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the new policy will overturn a climate policy that would have imposed higher costs on low- and middle-income Americans.

View the complete June 19 article by Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s order to trim science advisory panels sparks outrage

Former agency heads and environmentalists are blasting a new executive order issued late Friday evening as a stealthy means to remove scientific oversight from agency rulemaking.

Previous heads of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Interior Department say President Trump’s directive last week for all agencies to cut at least a third of their advisory committees by September would weaken the science-based regulations process that the administration has pushed back against since Trump took office.

“The decision is disappointing to anyone who cares about evidence-based policy making, scientific review or the truth,” said Carol Browner, the sole EPA administrator under former President Clinton, in an email to The Hill on Monday.

View the complete June 17 article by Rebecca Beitsch and Miranda Green on The Hill website here.

Republican and Democratic former EPA heads sound alarm on Trump administration

A predominately Republican group of former administrators blasted their perceived demise of the agency.

Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials — including three Republicans and one Democrat — sounded the alarm on Tuesday about the direction of the agency under President Donald Trump. They warned that decades of environmental progress are on the line.

Former EPA administrators under the Obama and Reagan administrations, as well as both Bush administrations, shared their concerns during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing.

“I am here today because I am deeply concerned that five decades of environmental progress are at risk because of the attitude and approach of the current administration,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the agency under former President George W. Bush and served as governor of New Jersey before that.

View the complete June 11 article by E. A. Crunden on the ThinkProgress website here.

White House poised to relax mileage standards, rebuffing automakers and setting up probable fight with California

A last-minute push by automakers appears unlikely to sway the Trump administration from abandoning President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy to improve mileage standards for cars and light trucks, two government officials said Friday.

The administration’s plan to freeze federal fuel-efficiency requirements for six years and end California’s authority to set its own standards has injected uncertainty into the auto market and raised the prospect of a drawn-out legal fight between federal officials and the nation’s biggest state.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are poised to finalize a proposal this summer that would set federal car standards at roughly 37 miles per gallon, rather than raising them to nearly 51 miles per gallon for 2025 models. The rule would also revoke California’s existing waiver to set its own rules under the Clean Air Act, a practice the federal government has sanctioned for decades.

View the complete June 7 article by Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Trump appointees ignored scientists on pollution requirements at Foxconn site in Wisconsin

WASHINGTON – Trump administration appointees overruled concerns from their own technical experts in deciding not to impose tougher smog requirements on the Wisconsin county where Foxconn Technology Group planned a $10 billion manufacturing facility, newly released documents show.

Under President Donald Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency initially had recommended labeling Racine County as violating federal air quality standards for ozone in 2017 — a designation that could have required Taiwan-based Foxconn to install expensive state-of-the-art pollution controls at its flat-screen manufacturing plant.

But after appeals by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and at the apparent direction of then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the EPA reversed course in 2018, ruling Racine was in compliance with the ground-level smog standard. The decision followed weeks of objections from EPA career staff, who said they saw no technical basis to justify it, according to correspondence released under a public records request.

View the complete May 27 article by Jennifer Dlouhy and Amena Saiyid from Bloomberg News on The Star Tribune website here.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

View the complete May 27 article by Coral Davenport and Mark Landler on The New York Times website here.

Trump’s EPA is ‘cooking the books’ to justify its attack on clean air rules

Experts call it a “deeply cynical strategy” that puts lives at risk.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to distort the way it measures the benefits of some of the agency’s most impactful policies, regulations that safeguard human health by limiting air pollution. The primary beneficiary of such distortion? The coal industry.

When the government evaluates the health and financial benefits of clean air, the calculation typically incorporates the number of lives saved and the scale of reduced health impacts thanks to reducing pollution — also known as “co-benefits.” Incorporating these factors into a cost-benefit analysis forms the very foundation upon which many environmental protections are based.

But now, experts warn the EPA is opening the door to industry challenges to these clean air rules by changing the way it evaluates the long-accepted science on the risk of particulate matter — microscopic particles polluting the air that are linked to increased heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory disease.

View the complete May 23 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.

E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution, a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, according to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans.

The E.P.A. had originally forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it is formally adopted.

The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.

 View the complete May 20 article by Lisa Friedman on The New York Times website here.

EPA watchdog suggests agency recover $124,000 in Pruitt’s ‘excessive’ travel expenses

Agency rejects the idea, calling ‘cost recovery inappropriate’ because officials had approved Pruitt’s trips at the time

The Environmental Protection Agency should consider recovering nearly $124,000 in improper travel expenses by former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, the agency’s inspector general recommended Thursday.

The findings, issued nearly a year after Pruitt resigned amid controversy over his spending, travel and ties to lobbyists and outside groups, highlight the fiscal impact of his penchant for high-end travel and accommodations. Investigators concluded that 40 trips Pruitt either took or scheduled during a 10-month period, between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2017, cost taxpayers $985,037.

The bulk of those expenses were for Pruitt’s round-the-clock security detail, which billed $428,896 in travel costs. The agency spent an additional $339,894 on staffers traveling with the former administrator. The “questioned amount” the inspector general’s office identifies for possible recovery is the $123,941 that taxpayers spent on flying both Pruitt and a security agent in first- or business class, instead of coach.

View the complete May 16 article by Juliet EIlperin and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Ignoring historic floods, EPA’s Wheeler says climate impacts are ’50 to 75 years out’

Meanwhile, Nebraska, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe are all underwater.

In his first televised interview since being confirmed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Andrew Wheeler said, “most of the threats from climate change are 50 to 75 years out.” However, major scientific reports, coupled with the rise in catastrophic fires, floods, and heatwaves around the world, contradict this statement.

In fact, the very first line of the government’s own National Climate Assessment states, “The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country.”

It’s unclear to what extent Wheeler has read the assessment; during his confirmation hearing in January, he told lawmakers he was still waiting for additional briefings. He has also made similar statements in the past, stating climate change “is not the greatest crisis.”

View the complete March 20 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.