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Trump Administration Prepares a Major Weakening of Mercury Emissions Rules (nytimes.com)
The Trump administration has completed a detailed legal proposal to dramatically weaken a major environmental regulation covering mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants, The New York Times reports, citing a person familiar with the matter. From the report: The proposal would not eliminate the mercury regulation entirely, but it is designed to put in place the legal justification for the Trump administration to weaken it and several other pollution rules, while setting the stage for a possible full repeal of the rule. Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is now the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected in the coming days to send the proposal to the White House for approval. The move is the latest, and one of the most significant, in the Trump administration's steady march of rollbacks of Obama-era health and environmental regulations on polluting industries, particularly coal. The weakening of the mercury rule -- which the E.P.A. considers the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry -- would represent a major victory for the coal industry. Mercury is known to damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses.
If you wanted specifics, you'd have read the article rather than posting questions that imply that this could be the right thing to do. A new limit isn't what's being proposed.
This legislation forces any cost/benefit analysis to be done using only the benefit of the reduction in mercury output without considering the additional benefits from the reduction in soot and nitrogen oxide that the emission controls produce.
Any analysis done would also have to ignore the cost of emission controls that would have to be put in place to keep soot and nitrogen oxide levels under legal limits, forcing any study to justify the cost of the emission controls based on the benefits of reducing mercury emissions alone.
The point of all this is to make it much harder to justify the cost of lower emission level limits by limiting health benefits that you can consider. That will make it easier to overturn the previous rules in court, which will let the Trump administration to allow corporations to harm even more people in the name of higher profits.