EPA moves to scrap rule set under Obama

A sweeping Obama-era climate rule could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2030, the Trump administration has found in its analysis of the plan, projecting that the plan could save more lives than the Obama administration said it would.

The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving to repeal the plan.

The rule in question is the Clean Power Plan, which consists of regulations on U.S. power plants aimed at decreasing the country’s contribution to global climate change by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. In practice, the rule is projected to move the energy sector away from coal-fired power plants and toward more natural gas-fired power plants, as well as wind and solar power sources.

Such power sources have lower emissions of greenhouse gases, but they also produce lower quantities of other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide. Such pollutants can cause respiratory problems, heart disease and lung cancer, conditions that would therefore be made less prevalent by the climate regulations.

The Obama administration loudly touted the Clean Power Plan’s health benefits while the EPA put measure in place in 2015. At the time, President Barack Obama’s EPA asserted that the plan could prevent 1,500 to 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030.

But when President Donald Trump’s EPA released a draft analysis of its repeal of the plan last month, it said that in one scenario, the plan would prevent 1,900 to 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2030.

That scenario is based on a 2017 “annual energy outlook” by the federal Energy Information Administration — which contained projections for the evolution of the U.S. power sector with, and without, the Clean Power Plan. It’s a more recent analysis than the ones EPA used under the Obama administration.

The Trump administration’s EPA has said that, in its analysis of the Clean Power Plan, it has deliberately provided a range of different numbers to outline different possibilities. The agency suggests that this is necessary because there were “numerous concerns and uncertainties associated with the previous administration’s approach.”