“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” said EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, according to one of the press releases. In a video message, he appeared to entirely change his agency’s mission: apparently EPA’s purpose now is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.” For the record, the agency’s own “About” page still says the mission is to “protect human health and the environment.” We’ll see how long that stays up.
Among the litany of regulatory rollbacks and targeted actions are the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, the Waters of the United States rule, electric vehicle mandates and tailpipe emissions rules, oil and gas wastewater regulations, manufacturing-related pollution rules, the Clean Power Plan regulating power plant emissions, and more. They will “formally reconsider” the 2009 endangerment finding, which made the straightforward conclusion that emissions of greenhouse gases harm human health and the environment and which underpins much of the country’s climate-related policy since then. They will end the Good Neighbor Plan, which made states that sent dangerous pollutants across borders clean up their act.
They will make you sick, stunt the development of fetuses and children, raise asthma and cancer rates, and attempt to block out the sun. They will, in fact, kill a lot of you.
The curse of any effective preventive measure is that people forget the things they are successfully preventing. The country is a far cleaner place than it was a half-century ago, in no small part because of the regulations Zeldin is now giddily trying to shred. Some of the impetus here is full-on ideological zealotry — Zeldin said, somehow without shame, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” — but most of it is just the age-old Republican desire to let a few rich business owners make more money dumping whatever they want into whatever they want. What’s a pediatric leukemia case or two in the face of a few bucks added to the bottom line?
A source inside EPA said employees there are used to new administrations changing priorities and attempting to roll back some regulations, but nothing even close to this dramatic attempt to undo many years of regulatory progress. “That’s ignoring decades of science,” the source said, though they added that in the first Trump administration the EPA lost a litany of lawsuits that hampered somewhat similar moves. The coming reduction in force may also hit the offices that have the expertise to actually write the rollbacks — which effectively will have to be new regulations — particularly hard, so it remains to be seen just how effective a gutted workforce can be, even where destruction is generally so much easier than its opposite.
Donald Trump has repeatedly over the years touted his plans to have the “cleanest air and water.” It feels almost trite at this point to point it out, but this is yet another campaign promise that he isn’t just breaking, but doing the literal opposite. The new Environmental Protection Agency, the one whose leadership doesn’t think it is supposed to Protect the Environment, will make everything as dirty as it can.
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