Trump attempts to weaken environmental protections

WASHINGTON» The Trump administration, in twin actions Thursday to curb environmental regulations, moved to speed the construction of energy projects temporarily and to weaken federal authority permanently to issue stringent clean air and climate change rules.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that calls on agencies to waive required environmental reviews of infrastructure projects to be built during the pandemic-driven economic crisis.

And the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a new rule that changes the way the agency uses cost-benefit analyses to enact Clean Air Act regulations, effectively limiting the strength of future air pollution controls.

Together, the actions signal Trump intends to speed his efforts to dismantle environmental regulations as the nation battles the coronavirus and a wave of unrest protesting the deaths of black Americans in Georgia, Minnesota and Kentucky. They also will help define the stakes in the presidential election, because neither effort would likely survive a Democratic victory. By changing the way the government weighs the value of the public health benefits, Andrew Wheeler, the EPA administrator, would allow the agency to justify weakening clean air and climate change regulations with economic arguments. Trump’s executive order uses “emergency authorities” to waive parts of the cornerstone National Environmental Policy Act to spur the construction of highways, pipelines and other infrastructure projects. Environmental activists and lawyers questioned the legality of the move and accused the administration of using the coronavirus pandemic and national unrest to speed up actions that have been moving slowly through the regulatory process. “When it comes to trying to unravel this nation’s environmental protection laws, this administration never sleeps,” said Richard Lazarus, professor of environmental law at Harvard University. Fossil fuel companies have long asserted that the economic formulas used by the federal government to justify pollution controls have unfairly harmed them. During the Obama administration, the EPA drafted a rule to limit toxic mercury pollution from power plants, estimating that it would cost the electric utility industry $9.6 billion a year. But an initial analysis found that reducing mercury would save just $6 million annually in health costs.

To justify that stark imbalance, the Obama administration found an additional $80 billion in health “co-benefits” from the incidental reduction of soot and nitrogen oxide that would occur as side effects of controlling mercury.

Last month, the Trump administration completed a rollback of that Obama mercury rule that discounted such co-benefits.

Now Wheeler has proposed extending that measure by eliminating or reducing the emphasis on co-benefits across all new Clean Air Act regulations.

This year, he is expected to propose a similar revamp of the cost-benefit formulas that govern clean water and chemical safety regulations.

Wheeler said the EPA still would calculate the economic value of such co-benefits. But he said those calculations would no longer be used in defending rules. “Co-benefits would not be used to justify the rule,” he said in a telephone call with reporters, noting specifically that the change would mean that regulations such as the Obamaera mercury rule would no longer be defensible.

“The way the Obama administration