Trump officials encounter resistance on environment
Power Plan, which would force a shuttering of coal plants to be replaced with electricity from natural gas, wind and the sun, is on hold as Trump’s team debates a solution to the fact that carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant under federal law and must be regulated by the EPA. And similar roadblocks face Trump’s efforts on everything from rolling back methane pollution regulations for the oil and gas industry to getting the final leg of the Keystone XL pipeline built.
At present, there are close to a dozen Obama-era environmental regulations that remain on hold in the courts while the Trump administration determines what course of action to take, said Jeff Holmstead, a Washington-based energy attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration.
“I think it’s too soon to say they’re not on track. But they’re not as far along on the regulatory process as a lot of people expected,” he said. “When you’re going to change a regulatory program, that’s a pretty significant undertaking. And they have announced their intention to do a lot of things.”
At the same time, Trump, who has promised to cut down Washington’s bureaucracy, has been slow in filling posts that might have been considered critical in past administrations. For instance, EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which would typically take the lead on redrawing climate change regulation, still is waiting for Trump to appoint a new administrator.
Meanwhile, the White House is facing resistance on many fronts. Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have been suing the administration relentlessly to block efforts to rewrite regulation. Trump has even at times struggled to win over Republicans in the Senate, some of whom have expressed skepticism about his proposal for dramatic funding cuts for environmental enforcement and research into cleanerburning forms of energy.
“He’s met strong resistance from individuals and cities and states, to groups like ours that are going to use the courts to make sure he’s enforcing the law,” said Anna Unruh Cohen, director of government affairs at the NRDC. “Trump and his administration are barking a lot, and it remains to be seen what they can actually accomplish.”
A case in point is the Trump administration’s difficulty in repealing a suite of Obama regulations forcing oil and gas companies to start checking and fixing methane leaks on tens of thousands of wells.
When Trump took office, a rule requiring those fixes on wells on federal lands was new enough that Congress still had time to repeal it. But it took four months to get it to the Senate floor for a vote, by which time Republicans faced a powerful coalition of environmentalists as well as state and local officials eager to get their hands on the royalties being lost with every cubic foot of escaping methane.
In an unexpected twist, Republicans Sen. John McCain, Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lindsey Graham sided with Democrats, blocking the repeal.
At the same time, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took on the task of getting rid of a separate EPA regulation for methane emissions. Knowing that writing a new regulation, as required under the law, could take years, Pruitt tried to delay implementing the methane regulation by two years. But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him last month, effectively forcing the EPA to enforce the very regulation Pruitt is trying to nix.
Most believe it unlikely that Trump’s EPA will be a vigilant enforcer of the methane regulation. But attorneys representing the oil industry are gearing up for a flood of lawsuits from environmentalists against projects they perceive not to be following the regulation.
“A lot of the environmental NGOs are pretty flush with cash right now,” said Michael Showalter, a Chicago attorney representing oil and other industries. “You have to remember, the political system in the U.S. is based on pervasive distrust. It takes a long time to do anything.”
Still, the administration is not without its victories.
Congress did send legislation to the president’s desk repealing an Obama regulation curbing water pollution from coal mining. And even as it has struggled in terms of regulation, the administration has expanded lease sales for oil and gas drilling and coal mining on federal lands.
No matter how slow the pace of regulatory change, many say the lack of new regulation is a victory in and of itself for many within the fossil fuel industry.
“The industry knows they have a president who’s not going to hurt them ,” said Stephen Moore, an economist at conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, who advised Trump during his presidential campaign. “Of course there’s setbacks, but Trump is fighting the goodfight.”
With more than three years left in his first term, Trump still has plenty of time left to complete or at least make a dent in his regulatory overhaul.
Reports are circulating around Washington that the EPA is readying to introduce its own version of the Clean Power Plan, which would regulate carbon emissions, but not as aggressively as President Barack Obama proposed, Holmstead said. “The industry believes they are better with a reasonable regulation than no regulation at all,” Holmstead said.
And the Nebraska Public Service Commission recently wrapped up public hearings on the Keystone XL project, which has now attracted opposition from not only environmentalists but ranchers and farmers. The commission is scheduled to make a final decision by November, which could clear the way for pipeline company TransCanada to begin construction on its project.
Since Obama rejected the pipeline in 2015, Keystone has become a rallying cry for environmentalists, spurring resistance against other fossil fuel projects.
And Trump is eager to halt that momentum.
“TransCanada will finally be allowed to complete this long-overdue project with efficiency and with speed,” he said when he approved the project in March. “It’s a historic moment for North America.”