The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Trump administration eases Obamaera rules on coal pollution
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration accelerated the pace of its environmental rollbacks for the country’s coalfired power plants Monday, proposing to weaken two Obamaera rules aimed at cleaning up dangerous heavy metals and ash from coal plants and keeping them from washing into groundwater and waterways.
The new proposals — the latest in a series of regulatory breaks granted by the administration for the sagging U.S. coal industry and for electric utilities using coalfired power plants — reduces “heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country,” EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement.
One of the two proposals released by Wheeler on Monday would relax some 2015 requirements on coalfired power plants for cleaning coal ash and toxic heavy metals — including mercury, arsenic and selenium — from plant wastewater before dumping it into waterways.
The other would give some utilities up to several years more to clean up or close the more than 400 unlined coal ash dumps around the country that lie within a few feet of groundwater.
President Donald Trump has embraced a series of regulatory breaks and boosts sought by the coal and utility industries, including overturning U.S. support of the Paris climate accord and scrapping a legacy Obama climate program aimed at pushing dirtierburning coal plants out of the country’s electrical grid.
But coal production in the U.S. has continued falling amid a boom for natural gas and some renewable energy, and U.S. coal facilities are closing despite the proposed regulatory relief.