Death by pandering

Defying environmental stewardship, public health, technology and economics, President Donald Trump once again has proposed sacrificing the public good to appeasing a slice of his political base.

Trump has proposed rolling back the Obama administration’s proposed standards to diminish carbon emissions from power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency’s mission is supposed to be to reduce air and water pollution, but this wayward proposal clearly would increase both.

The Trump proposal would have a particularly negative impact on Northeast Pennsylvania. Many of the highly polluting plants that Trump would save by increasing pollution are to the southwest, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and the Ohio Valley. Their pollution would be carried here by winds.

Under the targeted Clean Power Plan, carbon emissions from power plants would have to be reduced by 30 percent by 2030, based on a 2005 baseline, or by about 19 percent from current levels. The proposed Affordable Clean Energy plan would require carbon reductions of between 0.8 percent and 1.7 percent.

The EPA’s abandonment of pollution reduction follows the administration’s efforts to concoct methods to keep open coal and nuclearfueled power plants that continue to be eclipsed in the marketplace by gas-fueled plants and renewable sources. Incredibly, the EPA itself estimates that the rule could lead to between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths each year compared to the Obama-era rule.

That alone should render this giveaway to coal interests a nonstarter. Attorney General Josh Shapiro and his colleagues from other adversely affected states should sue to force the EPA to diminish, rather than increase, pollution that adversely affects public health.