What the Trump Administration's Rollback Plans for the EPA Mean for You

Alessandra Codinha
Updated
The E.P.A.’s new coal pollution rules will lead to more deaths.

The Trump administration dug into their position as proud enemies of both science and the future of the planet on Tuesday with the unveiling of their planned replacement for President Obama's Clean Power Plan. President Obama's plan had proposed limiting emissions on coal-burning plants (one of the main producers of climate altering greenhouse gases that scientists agree are fueling the planet’s rapid warming, contributing to climate change and erratic, dangerous weather patterns like hurricanes, wildfires, and tsunamis) and encouraged clean energy sources like wind and solar power. The Trump administration's new proposal, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency under it's new leader, Andrew Wheeler (whose predecessor, Scott Pruitt, had extensive ties to the oil and gas industries, and repeatedly vowed that "the war against coal is over"), would relax those limits on power plants, and instead give states three years to devise standards based on a unit-by-unit analysis of their utilities’ operations, the Washington Post writes: "The EPA would then have a year to determine whether to approve the state plans, and another year to impose a federal plan if they determine a plan is insufficient."

Essentially, the plan, as proposed, undermines the whole endeavor of saving the planet (and, you know, assuring a future for humanity) in favor of supporting coal miners. (This is despite the fact that power sources like natural gas are actually proven to be cheaper than coal, but hey!) “Today’s proposal provides the states and regulated community the certainty they need to continue environmental progress while fulfilling President Trump’s goal of energy dominance,” Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the E.P.A., said in a statement. Gina McCarthy, who headed the EPA under President Obama, told the Washington Post on Monday that Trump officials “have designed a proposed rule that, if finalized, would not set federal standards for lowering carbon pollution as the law required, but would instead give states the option to do just a little or absolutely nothing to lower carbon pollution...This is all about ‘coal at all costs.’” That's not good news for you!

We know that burning coal is bad for the environment, but for those who'd rather think in the short-term, it's also really bad for your health. The New York Times noted that in the attached analysis that accompanied the proposed plan, the Trump administration conveyed that between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths "would occur annually by 2030 because of increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates known as PM 2.5, which are dangerous because of their link to heart and lung disease as well as their ability to trigger chronic problems like asthma and bronchitis" because of its plan. (Compare this to the Obama administration's central argument for the Clean Power plan, which was that the measure would protect both human lives and the planet: "Specifically, it said, the plan would help avoid between 1,500 and 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030.") And anyways, that's not even to mention the increasingly life-endangering extreme weather that's resulted from increased carbon emissions, and the connection between climate change and refugee crises that have basically ensured a future full of climate refugees. And you know how this administration feels about immigration!

“With the Trump dirty power plan we see again that the Trump administration cares more about extending the lives of coal plants than the American people,” Conrad Schneider, the advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit group told the Times. Though really, it's prizing coal plants above any people at all, including his supporters, who last time we checked, have to breathe the same air as the rest of us, and live on the same increasingly endangered, unraveling planet. Trump will attend a rally in West Virginia tonight. It's his sixth since becoming president.

Trending Stories on Culture:

  • Melania Trump Meets Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in Strange Video - Read More

  • How Pope Francis Is Changing the Catholic Church - Read More

  • Serena Williams’s Husband, Alexis Ohanian, Makes All the Other Husbands Look Bad - Read More

  • Lindsay Lohan’s New Reality TV Show: Is She Our Next Lisa Vanderpump? - Read More

  • Phone Addiction? Here’s One Way to Fix It - Read More

See the videos.