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EPA Changing Rule To Allow More Mercury Pollution
The Trump administration continues to roll back environmental protections so special interests can profit at the expense of our health.
For more than three years, the Trump administration has prided itself on working with industry to unshackle companies from burdensome environmental regulations.
Despite a chorus of opposition from unions, business groups and electric utilities, the EPA is on the verge of finalizing its proposal as part of a broader effort to overhaul how the government calculates the health benefits of cleaner air. Coal executives have lobbied for it...
The rule in question, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), targets a powerful neurotoxin that can affect the IQ and motor skills of children, even in utero.
Between 2006, when states began to curb mercury from coal plants, and 2016, when the Obama-era rule took full effect, emissions have declined 85 percent.
Just shameful.
The agency plans to declare that it is not “appropriate and necessary” for the government to limit harmful pollutants from power plants, even though every utility in America has complied with standards put in place in 2011 under President Barack Obama.
It’s a rollback that industry officials argue could open the door to new legal fights, prompt some plants to turn off their pollution controls and ultimately sicken more Americans — all so that the administration can rewire how the government weighs the costs of regulation.
Major power providers in the US want to keep the pollution rules in place!
American Electric Power, for instance, has spent more than $1 billion to comply with the standards since 2011, along with other rules limiting sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. It shut down nearly 7,300 megawatts of coal-fired generation at 11 different plant sites in 2015 and 2016 alone.
The company and its competitors, represented by the Edison Electric Institute, have urged the administration to preserve a rule they once opposed.
Exelon, one of the nation’s largest utilities, told the EPA that its effort to change a rule that has cut emissions of mercury and other toxins is “an action that is entirely unnecessary, unreasonable, and universally opposed by the power generation sector.”
Kathy Robertson, a senior manager for environmental policy at the company, said the industry long ago complied with the rule. “And it works,” she said. “The sector has gotten so much cleaner as a result of this rule.”
Corruption.