One of Trump’s first acts was to scrawl his name on an executive order that authorized coal companies to dump waste in rivers and streams. This not only promises to turn hundreds of miles of waterways into sludge, it also makes it easier for mines to practice mountaintop removal mining, simultaneously destroying a 400-million-year-old landscape and resulting in fewer jobs for miners. Not bad for one sloppy stroke of the pen.
But Donald Trump is nothing if not competitive, and now he has Scott Pruitt on his side. Together, there’s nothing they can’t make worse.
The Trump administration has hit the pause button on an Obama-era regulation aimed at limiting the dumping of toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury by the nation’s power plants into public waterways.
“I have decided that it is appropriate and in the public interest to reconsider the rule,” Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote this week in a letter to groups that had petitioned the agency to revisit the rule, which was finalized in 2015.
Power plants that burn coal were supposed to begin cutting back on heavy metals they release into water starting in 2018. The rule was specifically written to not pre-select a level of improvement, but to match required cleanup with technology available at the time so that the required cleanup was always achievable.
So why not implement the rule?
On Thursday, the EPA said the rule would cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year to comply with. ...
“Some of our nation’s largest job producers have objected to this rule ...”
Well if the industry objected, then sure. Bring on the arsenic.
The idea that a regulation will cost too much, or be too hard to implement, is what industry puts forward every time. It doesn’t matter how little it will actually cost or how tripping-over-own-feet easy it is to put in place. But that’s okay, because Pruitt is willing to go along with industry. Every time.
Also apparently not a concern of Trump or Pruitt: The cost of not implementing the regulation.
The move drew immediate condemnation from environmental groups, which called it a gift to the energy industry. They insisted that the Trump administration focused only on potential costs of the rule while ignoring its benefits, and that delays in compliance will endanger wildlife and pose health threats to families that live near coal plants, as exposure to heavy metals can cause problems with cognitive development in children, among other problems.
Wildlife. Families. Do they have a cool lobbying organization like the Utility Water Act Group arguing their case? No. They do not.
So why would Pruitt ever listen to them?