Promising to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday outlined plans for an aggressive rollback of environmental regulations.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece and an EPA news release, Zeldin announced that he intends to reconsider more than a dozen core EPA rules and regulations, including those pertaining to emissions standards for vehicles, pollution from power plants and the finding that provides the scientific basis for addressing climate change.
“Today marks the death of the Green New Scam,” Zeldin wrote in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that his deregulation plan would create an environment where “businesses can thrive and infrastructure can be built.” He added that he wants to reassess rules that, in his view, “throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants,” and suggested that his proposed actions would roll back “trillions of dollars in regulatory costs.”
The EPA announced that it will revisit water pollution limits for coal plants, air quality standards for small particles and the mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by large emitters like oil and gas companies, among other rules.
Zeldin also signaled that the EPA would consider upending its own endangerment finding, a 2009 legal decision that says greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are warming the Earth and that warming presents a threat to public health and welfare. The finding is the lynchpin for the agency’s regulations about greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act.
“The endangerment finding is the one ring that rules them all, at least on the climate protection measures,” said David Doniger, the senior strategist and attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and energy department, referencing the Lord of the Rings series. “All of the climate protection rules, the rules to cut greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, power plants, from the oil and gas industry — all those rules are grounded in the finding.”
The EPA news release called it “the most momentous day” in the agency’s history.
Environmental advocates said the deregulation effort is unparalleled in the EPA’s 54-year history.
“This is crazy. This is insane,” said Jason Rylander, the legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, during a phone interview as he read, for the first time in full, the list of regulations the EPA said it may roll back. “There have been attempts to limit the authority of EPA, but the scale and scope and speed with which this administration is attacking environmental safeguards is unprecedented.”
The agency’s announcement promises to spark legal battles with environmental groups that have vowed to fight the rollbacks. But first, the agency has to initiate a rulemaking process that will take months, if not longer, to complete.
Environmental advocates said the work involved in overturning this many regulations would be monumental.
“These are all rules and regulations. They can’t just wish them away with a press release. You have to tear a regulation down the same way it was built up. They have to make a proposal for each one of these things and explain reasoning and show evidence, and they have to have public comment and respond to public comment and then reach a final decision and defend it in court,” Doniger said. “We’re going to fight them every step of the way.”
He added that any efforts to overturn the endangerment finding would be particularly difficult for the EPA in court.
“That is going to be an impossible task for them,” Doniger said, describing a “Denali-size” mountain of evidence showing that greenhouse gas pollution is fueling climate change and intensifying harms like wildfires, flooding and heat waves.
In a news release, Zeldin said the agency would “follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads” as the agency reconsiders the legal basis for EPA’s climate regulations.
Some agency staffers said they were dismayed by Zeldin’s announcement.
“Simply put, this is embarrassing,” one EPA worker said, on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “This is not the EPA we have dedicated our careers to. Instead of highlighting the importance of protecting human health and the environment, this administration is highlighting cutting cost in dollar figures while ignoring the human cost. The air we breathe and water we drink is a collective human right and more valuable than any dollar figure.”
In his opinion piece, Zeldin seemed to anticipate such criticism.
“Critics may claim that these changes signal a retreat from environmental protection. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Under the Trump administration, the EPA’s core mission remains safeguarding human health and the environment. The difference lies in how we achieve these goals—through partnership rather than prescriptive bureaucracy, through collaboration rather than regulation.”
The EPA also announced on Wednesday that it would end its environmental justice programs, according to a news release. Zeldin ordered the reorganization and elimination of the Office of Environmental Justice and Environmental Justice divisions in its 10 regions, according to an agency memo reviewed by NBC News. The agency previously put about 170 environmental justice staffers on leave.
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