The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last month proposed eliminating two recent rules that would have protected public health and helped address climate change.
We are a practicing pulmonologist who treats and studies the health effects of air pollution and a lawyer who has worked to develop legally durable regulations to address climate and environmental harms. While we come to this issue from different disciplines, we share a common concern: These proposals, if finalized, would undermine progress on air pollution and climate change, which is an unprecedented human health crisis.
While the details of the rules may appear technical and legal, their impact is deeply personal: They determine whether your child breathes cleaner air, whether your community faces higher cancer and asthma rates, and whether our climate becomes increasingly unstable. The EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment. These proposals undermine that mission.
Mary B. Rice and Carrie Jenks
Which regulations would be repealed?
The 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) set more stringent emission limits on hazardous air pollutants like mercury and other toxic metals from coal- and oil-fired power plants. Compliance with these standards would have phased in over the next few years. The Trump EPA is proposing to repeal this rule even though over 90% of plants already meet the more protective standard. The EPA also proposes to eliminate the requirement for continuous emissions monitoring, making it easier for higher emissions to go undetected between compliance tests and allowing plants that burn lignite coal to emit twice as much mercury as non-lignite plants.
The EPA also wants to eliminate the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards for power plants, which set the nation’s only enforceable limits on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and existing fossil fuel-fired power plants. The EPA is arguing, for the first time, that power plants do not “contribute significantly” to dangerous GHG pollution under the Clean Air Act, even though the sector represents the largest stationary source of GHG emissions in the United States. The implications are drastic. If the EPA were to finalize this approach, it would prevent GHG emission limits on power plants and any other stationary sources under the Clean Air Act.
Read the full article by Mary B. Rice and Carrie Jenks at the Harvard Climate Blog.