Via the AP: EPA head says he’ll roll back dozens of environmental regulations, including rules on climate change.
“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,’’ EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an essay in The Wall Street Journal.
A grand irony here is that what we know about climate change is based in scientific inquiry, while the whole
“Golden Age” stuff is as fantastically faith-based as it gets.
None of the changes take effect immediately, and nearly all will require a long rulemaking process. Environmental groups vowed to oppose the actions, which one said would result in “the greatest increase in pollution in decades’’ in the U.S.
Part of me thinks it is quaint that the reporter thinks this will be be done through a deliberate process, and part of me hopes that is true.
I will agree that regulatory reform, properly pursued, it a reasonable goal. Likewise, I am not surprised that a Republican administration would be less in favor of environmental regulation. However, this is blatantly irresponsible and clearly undercuts the EPA’s mission.
Note the following contrast from the NYT write-up.
The E.P.A. has “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment,” the first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, said as he explained its mission to the country weeks after the E.P.A. was created by President Richard M. Nixon. He said the agency would be focused on research, standards and enforcement in five areas: air pollution, water pollution, waste disposal, radiation and pesticides.
Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.
In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.
In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the E.P.A.’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
Mr. Zeldin called Wednesday’s actions “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” He added, “today the green new scam ends, as the E.P.A. does its part to usher in a golden age of American success.”
It is also another example of how tearing things down is far easier than building them back up will be. And, worse, this is another situation in which there will be long-term consequences that will take years and years to repair.
Not to get too simplisitc, but I have lived in two places in my life wherein emissions visibly created substantial air pollution: Southern California and Bogotá, Colombia. In both cases, I also witnessed how environmental regulations substantially improved air quality. In both cases, it took years and a lot of deliberate action by government. All the economic incentives were to continue to pollute. As such, I am always a bit skeptical when told that there is a cost-free way to roll back such regulations.
But, hey, I am sure more mercury, soot, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be fine and dandy!
