Environmental PROTECTION Agency Is Using COVID-19 To Ignore Pollution Laws

Trump and coal-lobbyist-turned-EPA-administrator Andrew Wheeler are using this crisis as a cover to roll back environmental laws.

On March 26, the EPA announced a temporary relaxing of enforcement rules, allowing factories, power plants, and other companies to stop conducting routine tests for pollutants and reporting them to the agency if they could claim the pandemic had led to a shortage of staff or other operational challenges.

The new EPA rule states that the agency would not issue fines for "violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification obligations in situations where the EPA agrees that COVID-19 was the cause of the noncompliance.” The guidance is retroactively effective to March 13 with no current end date in place.

The EPA is refusing to say how many companies have requested noncompliance waivers under the new policy...

We'd like to insert a GIF of a blank stare into the abyss at the absurdity of what we just typed above.  The government should be focused on protecting public health, not making it worse.

Lawmakers are pushing back against a sweeping rollback of pollution regulations recently announced by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the coronavirus pandemic...

“This pandemic isn’t an excuse for polluters to ignore the law and for EPA to let them get away with it,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said. “It’s absurd that Donald Trump and former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler are using this public health and economic crisis as a cover to roll back environmental laws. The government should be focused on protecting public health now, not making it worse.”

In their letter, Warren and Markey asked the EPA to respond to six questions about the rationale for the new policy and who weighed in on it, clarification on how it will be carried out, and what will factor into the decision to end it.... also asked about whether the agency conducted any analyses to determine how the policy will impact pollution levels and what that could mean for environmental justice communities.

Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/warren-epa-coronavirus-letter-polluters