EPA administrator announces huge rollback of environmental regulations

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday outlined plans for an aggressive rollback of environmental regulations.

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. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/epa-rollback-environmental-regulations-zeldin-rcna196112

---