Environmental PROTECTION Agency Green Lights Toxic Waste From Coal Plants in Our Water

Trump is allowing companies to poison you and the environment to help coal lobbyists cut costs.

The Trump administration on August 31, 20202 relaxed strict standards for how coal-fired power plants dispose of wastewater laced with dangerous pollutants like lead, selenium and arsenic, a move environmental groups said would leave rivers and streams vulnerable to toxic contamination.

The Environmental Protection Agency regulation scaled back the types of wastewater treatment technologies that utilities must install to protect rivers and other waterways. It also pushed back compliance dates and exempted some power plants from taking any action at all.

It just keeps getting worse.

Coal plants often use scrubbers to remove mercury, sulfur dioxide and other substances from smokestacks, which are then poured into nearby rivers and streams.

In 2015 the Obama administration, revising standards that had not been touched since the 1980s, required industry to set deadlines for power plants to invest in state-of-the-art wastewater treatment technology to keep toxic pollution out of waterways.... required them to monitor local water quality and make more information about the results publicly available.

....the regulations would stop about 1.4 billion pounds of toxic metals and other pollutants from pouring into rivers and streams and cost industry $480 million a year.  The E.P.A. at the time said the public would save about that same amount of money through benefits like lowered health care costs.

If we give Trump another four years in the White House, our planet may never recover.

“There are dozens of water bodies around the country where the local water is significantly impacted by this type of direct dumping of toxic metals from power plants,” said Thomas Cmar, an attorney with the environmental group Earthjustice.

He said the new rule would help keep older, dirtier coal plants alive longer by allowing companies to use “cheap and ineffective methods of dumping pollution into our waterways.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/climate/trump-coal-plants.html