Audobon News

That interpretation could leave not only the mercury standards, but also other regulations that promote public health, vulnerable to legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry, says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University and a former EPA official. “I think this has a little bit less to do with this particular set of emissions standards and more to do with a much bigger project the agency and the administration have, which is to essentially sabotage or manipulate cost-benefit analysis so that it always comes out to show that the costs of regulation outweigh the benefits,” he says.

“While the headline is reassuring that the standards are proposed to be left in place, the underlying action here, which is removing the ‘appropriate and necessary’ finding, suddenly makes those regulations legally vulnerable in a way that they weren’t,” says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University and a former EPA official.