WASHINGTON – In what he called “the most consequential deregulation day in American history,” the Environmental Protection Agency Commissioner announced a series of Wednesday’s actions to roll back landmark environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, climate change and electric vehicles.
“We drive our daggers through the heart of climate change religions, engaging the arrival of America’s golden age,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in an essay for the Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration’s actions will eliminate trillions of regulatory costs and “hidden taxes,” Zeldin said it will cut the cost of living for American families and lower prices for essential items such as buying a car, heating a home and running a business.
“Our actions will also rekindle American manufacturing and spread economic benefits to the community,” he writes. “The control of energy is at the heart of America’s revival.”
Overall, Zeldin said it is rolling back 31 environmental rules, including scientific recognition, a central basis for US actions against climate change.
Zeldin said he and President Donald Trump support a 2009 discovery in 2009, rewriting the discovery that the greenhouse gases that warm the planet put public health and welfare at risk. Obama-era decisions under the Clean Air Act are the legal basis for many climate regulations in vehicles, power plants and other sources of pollution.
Environmentalists and climate scientists say that attempts to spur extinction, which finds the foundations of our laws, have little chance of success.
“Faced with overwhelming science, it is impossible to believe that the EPA can develop conflicting findings that will rise up in court,” said David Doniger, climate expert at the Environmental Group’s Natural Resources Defense Council.
In related actions, Zeldin said the EPA will rewrite rules limiting air pollution from fossil fuel launch plants and alternative measures that limit emissions from cars and trucks. Zeldin and the Republican president mistakenly label the car rules as “orders” for electric vehicles.
President Joe Biden’s democratic administration said power plant rules would help America provide reliable, long-term supply of electricity it needs while reducing pollution and improving public health.
Biden, who characterized the presidency, cited the car rules as an important factor that he called the “historical progress” in the pledge that half of all new cars and trucks sold in the United States will be zero emissions by 2030.
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The EPA also aims not only for rules that limit industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins, but also for separate rules regarding soot contamination and federal protection in important areas of wetlands, Zeldin said. The EPA has also ended its diversity, equity and comprehensive programme and closed some of its agency focused on environmental justice. This initiative has been working to improve the situation in areas that are heavily burdened by industrial pollution, primarily low-income and majority black or Hispanic communities.
“This is not about abandoning environmental protection, it’s about achieving it through innovation, not strangulation,” writes Zeldin. “By rethinking rules examining oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants, we are ensuring that American energy remains clean, affordable and reliable.”
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann called the EPA’s actions “the latest form of Republican climate denial.” They can no longer deny that climate change is happening, so instead, they pretend it’s not a threat, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it is probably the biggest threat we face today. ”
The directive to discover danger and rethink other EPA regulations was a recommendation from Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term. Russell Vert, director of the White House Management and Budget Office and co-author of Project 2025, has postponed the action for a long time.
“Climate EPA regulations will affect the entire national economy, including employment, wages and family budgets,” Vought said Wednesday.
“The Trump administration’s ignorance is only launched through malice towards the planet,” rebutted Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for the Climate Law Institute for Biodiversity. “Hell and high waters, raging fires, deadly heat waves, Trump and his companions are bent on putting the benefits of the polluters ahead of people’s lives.”
Rethinking the findings of danger and other actions, Rylander said, “we will not stand up in court.” “We’re going to fight that at every stage.”
The United States is the world’s second largest carbon polluter after China and the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases.
The move to end environmental justice staff follows a lawsuit last week to stop a lawsuit against Louisiana’s petrochemical plant, accused of increasing cancer risk in the majority black community. Zeldin called environmental justice “mainly used as an excuse to fund leftist activists, and instead of actually spending it directly to fix environmental issues in those communities, it has been used as an excuse to fund leftist activists.”
Matthew Tejada, who once headed the EPA’s Environmental Justice Office, said Trump and Zeldin “bring us back to an era of free pollution across the country, exposing all Americans to toxic chemicals, dirty air and polluted water.” Tejada currently works at NRDC.
Ann Bradbury, CEO of the petroleum industry group American Exploration & Production Council, welcomed Zeldin’s actions, saying the US is “stronger and safer if we dominate energy.”
Her group has long called for changes to the EPA rules, so Bradbury said it was “practical, effective and built on the significant emission reductions” that oil and gas producers have done. “We will support updating these rules so that Americans can continue to benefit from affordable, reliable, clean American energy.”
New Jersey Rep. Frank Paron, a top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called Zeldin’s actions “a sneaky betrayal of Americans.”
Every day, more Americans lose their lives to exacerbate jobs, homes, and even climate disasters, Palone said. Trump and Zeldin “has been laughing at the pain of those people,” Paron said, adding that “it will have a quick and devastating effect on the environment and health of all Americans.”
By Matthew Daly Associate Press
