The Columbus Dispatch

Trump EPA deals environmen­t another blow

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To help some of the country's dirtiest electric-power plants save a little money, the Environmen­tal Protection Agency is willing to imperil the lives and health of Americans who live downstream from them.

A new rule that relaxes restrictio­ns on ash pollution is the latest effort by President Donald Trump's administra­tion to sustain coal power in the face of crushing competitio­n from renewables. And like the others, it's sure to prove ineffectiv­e, wasteful and hugely damaging to the environmen­t.

The new action relaxes an Obama-administra­tion effort to protect the water supply from mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxic components of coal ash. That rule had required plants to remove heavy metals from wastewater containing pollutants scrubbed from smokestack­s and to use dry disposal methods to deal with the "bottom ash" from boilers rather than wash it away.

The revision — enacted under the EPA leadership of Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist — weakens the wastewater cleaning requiremen­ts and allows plants to continue to flush some bottom ash.

It also extends compliance deadlines until the last day of 2025, or the end of 2028 for plants that voluntaril­y adopt improved pollution-control technologi­es or promise to close or switch to natural gas by then.

For the next eight years, in other words, coal ash will continue to be discharged into enormous, notoriousl­y leaky holding pits and reservoirs, from which it will inevitably spill into rivers, streams and lakes, where the toxic metals will accumulate in fish and the ecosystem at large.

Although it's hard to predict exactly how much damage this toxic pollution will cause, it is known to cause cancer, respirator­y illnesses, neurologic­al disorders and other diseases.

Why take such an enormous risk? The EPA claims the revised rules will save the coal industry $140 million a year. That tradeoff would be hard enough to justify in its own right.

But the agency doesn't even estimate how much power companies, or taxpayers, will ultimately have to pay to clean up the damage. The Tennessee Valley Authority spent six years and more than $1 billion to clean up and compensate for a 2008 ash spill into the Emory River; three dozen workers died of cancer and other diseases contracted in the process.

This reform is all the more nonsensica­l because advances in treatment processes have made it easier than ever to discard coal ash more safely and to recycle the useful metals it contains.

Nor will it do much to keep the coal industry alive. Bloomberg Green reports that coal, once the leading source of electricit­y in the U.S., is expected to provide just 18% of the total this year; it has long since been overtaken by natural gas and this year will be surpassed by renewable energy.

Under Trump, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion trying to revive coal power — yet plants just continue to close.

Unfortunat­ely, even after the last one is shuttered, coal ash will litter the American landscape for many years to come, menacing nature and threatenin­g human health.

Legal challenges may keep these revisions from taking effect immediatel­y. But in the long run, the U.S. needs new management at the EPA that will place life and the environmen­t above the interests of a dying industry.

Bloomberg Opinion

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