Posted on May 21, 2019
The Trump administration
continues to erode US regulation in many areas – especially of the environment,
with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies advancing
policies to benefit the fossil fuels industry.
The latest depredation:
changing a calculation method so as to understate the health risks of air
pollution, and thereby allow states to decide how (or whether) they will
regulate coal-fired power plans. As The New York Times reported yesterday
in E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Deaths Off the Books by
Changing Its Math:
The Environmental Protection
Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution,
a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule
because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, according
to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans.
The E.P.A. had originally
forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and
replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model
would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the
Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it
is formally adopted.
The proposed shift is the
latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in
regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is
little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law
requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and
that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate
pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
The Trump EPA’s final version
of its Affordable Clean Energy Rule is slated to be made public in June.
The Environmental Working
Group (EWG) says in Trump EPA’s Fake Math: Clean Air Doesn’t Save Lives, So Burn
More Coal that experts say the new methodology is unsound and hadn’t
been reviewed by independent scientists:
It ignores decades of research
by EPA scientists, instead relying on “unfounded medical assumptions” that
there is no benefit to air that is any cleaner than is required by law – even
when those standards are not strictly based on protecting health but are the
product of political and economic compromise.
“Using fake math to hide the
death toll from dirty air at the behest of the coal industry is sadly
consistent with the Trump administration’s complete disregard for public
health,” said Olga Naidenko, Ph.D., EWG’s senior science advisor for children’s
environmental Health. “This sleight of hand means that more adults may die
early and more children may become victims of asthma.”
The Trump EPA’s goal is clear:
it wants to rescind its predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, which would have capped
emissions from coal power plants. The EWG notes:
EPA’s own career scientists
previously estimated that the Clean Power Plan would prevent up to 4,500
premature deaths and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children, and lead to
climate and health benefits worth up to $93 billion in 2030.
The Trump EPA’s replacement,
the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, will leave it up to states to decide how or
whether they will regulate pollution from coal-fired power plants. It is
expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by a paltry 1.5
percent by 2030, far below the 30 percent target under the earlier proposal.
States Step in to Regulate the
Environment
The new EPA rule will
undoubtedly be subject to legal challenge once it’s issued, and it’s impossible
to predict what the ultimate legal resolution will be.
Does this mean the outlook for
environmental regulation is as bleak as it seems, at least until a new
president is inaugurated (assuming Trump doesn’t secure a second term)?
Not exactly.
The Washington Post
published a comprehensive piece on 20th May, States aren’t waiting for the Trump administration on
environmental protections, detailing several areas in which state
regulators have stepped in to advance state-level environmental protection
measures:
More than a dozen states are
moving to strengthen environmental protections to combat a range of issues from
climate change to water pollution, opening a widening rift between stringent
state policies and the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
In recent months, Hawaii, New
York and California have moved to ban a widely used agricultural pesticide
linked to neurological problems in children, even as the administration has
resisted such restrictions. Michigan and New Jersey are pushing to restrict a
ubiquitous class of chemical compounds that have turned up in drinking water,
saying they can no longer wait for the Environmental Protection Agency to take
action.
Colorado and New Mexico have
adopted new policies targeting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel
drilling and limiting where these operations can take place. And more than a
dozen states have adopted policies that would force automakers to produce more
fuel-efficient cars than required by federal standards.
The Post account decried the
uncertainty and compliance burdens the ramping up of various state measures
imposes on US businesses – which now must comply with a patchwork of state
regulations, rather than uniform federal standards.
The Post account described
several intitiatives. I’ll mention one here: requiring more fuel-efficient
cars. Fourteen states, including California, and the District of Columbia, are
bucking administration policy on this issue.
Breaking New Legal Ground
Not mentioned in the Post
account, but another area in which states are pioneering new approaches to
reducing – and paying the costs arising from climate change – is climate
liability litigation. New York last year filed a federal lawsuit against five
major oil companies for their contributions to climate change. That suit was
dismissed, but is under appeal (see this account in Climate Liability
News, NYC Files Appeal, Challenges Dismissal of Climate Liability
Suit for further details).
Hawaii is now mulling its
legal options. As Climate Liability News reported in Hawaii Leaders Mull Potential of Climate Liability
Cases:
Lawmakers and experts met in
Honolulu earlier this month to discuss current trends in climate litigation and
how Hawaii could leverage its own laws to recoup damages brought by climate
change.
“Oil companies like BP should
be held responsible for the damage done to our environment by their
activities,” Sen. Mazie Hirono said at the climate conference, explaining why she
co-drafted a friend-of-the-court brief in support of climate liability lawsuits filed by the cities of
Oakland and San Francisco.
…
Such legal action could put
fossil fuel companies on the hook for damages. The state of Rhode Island, cities of New York, Baltimore, Oakland and San Francisco and Boulder as well as counties in California and Colorado
are among those that have filed lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, a
wave of claims that has spread from exclusively coastal regions to inland
jurisdictions.
Hawaiian law makes it a
particularly congenial jurisdiction for bringing such lawsuits, according to
Climate Liability News:
Hawaii’s laws concerning
indigenous rights provide additional grounds for the state to bring potential
climate lawsuits, the panelists said. The state follows U.S. common law and
recognizes indigenous rights. Courts as well as state and county agencies
are constitutionally mandated to protect “all rights,
customarily and traditionally exercised for subsistence, cultural and religious
purposes and possessed by ahupua‘a tenants who are descendants of native
Hawaiians.”
In addition, the state has
been at the forefront of initiatives to address climate change:
Hawaii was the first state to
implement legislation that aligns with the Paris Agreement and is one of
several states with environmental rights provisions in their constitutions. The state’s
legislators want Hawaii’s proactive climate policy––which includes committing
the state to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 and a proposal for the state
to become the first to tax carbon emissions––to set an example for climate change
mitigation worldwide.
The Bottom Line
We’re a long way away from the
state of play when a Republican President, Richard Nixon, created the EPA via a
reorganisation plan (see my post, Happy
Earth Day 2019). The Trump administration’s environmental record is
atrocious. In the climate change area, it’s highly unlikely that Trump will
step up and endorse a Green New Deal anytime soon – although, to be sure, with
Trump, it’s never quite clear just what he might decide to do next. Recall that
old New York Lotto ad: You never know…
Leaving that extreme
possibility aside, states and municipalities are at the moment the key
battleground. Policymakers are not powerless, and can advance initiatives to
protect their citizens in the face of federal inaction on crucial environmental
issues.
If these initiatives are
well-crafted, they can provide models for a future time – which I
hope is not too far distant – when more environmentally-minded policymakers
fill federal positions again.
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