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EPA Proposes Rule Change That Would Let Power Plants Release More Toxic Pollution (npr.org)
The Trump administration announced on Friday a plan designed to make it easier for coal-fired power plants, after nearly a decade of restrictions, to release into the atmosphere more mercury and other pollutants linked to developmental disorders and respiratory illnesses [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source].
From a report: The limits on mercury, set in 2011, were the first federal standards to restrict some of the most hazardous pollutants emitted by coal plants and were considered one of former President Barack Obama's signature environmental achievements. Since then, scientists have said, mercury pollution from power plants has declined more than 80 percent nationwide. President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, but it would lay the groundwork for doing so by weakening a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains.
In announcing the proposed rule, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the cost of cutting mercury from power plants "dwarfs" the monetary benefits. The proposal, which the acting E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed on Thursday, is expected to appear in the federal register in the coming weeks. The public will have 60 days to comment on it before a final rule is issued. [...] Reworking the mercury rule, which the E.P.A. considers the priciest clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry, would represent a victory for the coal industry, and in particular for Robert E. Murray, an important former client of Mr. Wheeler's from his days as a lobbyist.
In announcing the proposed rule, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the cost of cutting mercury from power plants "dwarfs" the monetary benefits. The proposal, which the acting E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed on Thursday, is expected to appear in the federal register in the coming weeks. The public will have 60 days to comment on it before a final rule is issued. [...] Reworking the mercury rule, which the E.P.A. considers the priciest clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry, would represent a victory for the coal industry, and in particular for Robert E. Murray, an important former client of Mr. Wheeler's from his days as a lobbyist.
Profits > human health and well being and lives.
And the donors paid awesome money for Trump and the Republicans. They are getting exactly what they want.
See, the Republican has been sold this lie that environmental protections are liberal snowflake luxuries when in fact they are about protecting our health and well being. And then you have business owners who say regulations are "job killers" and when those regulations are removed they - get this - STILL eliminate jobs to fatten their bottom lines even more.
But yet we little people are stuck with the healthcare bills and costs for the damage caused by the pollution and toxins.
In the spirit of fact-checking myself, I found the annual hidden costs of coal to be $345 Billion, which is not just limited to health concerns
Glad I didn't let my earlier statement stand unchallenged
If you read the article, you'll see that slashdot's and the NYT's headline is false and misleading. The proposed change does not allow the release of more mercury or repeal existing regulations. It makes it harder for the EPA to implement more regulations beyond what already exists:
"It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains."
I'm sure the NYT knows this and is purposely being misleading or maybe they are brain dead enough to not understand what they are printing. Regardless this is exactly the kind of crap that makes people distrust the media. An argument on whether it's worth the economic costs to further reduce mercury emissions beyond the 80% reduction that has already occurred by wiping out the remaining coal plants is worth having, but it isn't possible to do that when the media is falsely reporting stuff like this and people don't take the time to carefully read and understand what is being said.
but the point is that the justification for the current rule is large scale savings due to better health outcomes due to lower exposure to mercury.
This rule change says that only direct savings can be considered, which throws out $80 billion in savings from better health.
The next step will be to declare that the cost of the program relative to it's benefit is too high and eliminate it, which in turn will allow the EPA to overturn the Obama era ruling.
The reason for doing this is so when they're inevitably sued by environmental watchdogs they can win in court.
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this is ground work to defend against a lawsuit. As I pointed out the original justification, as per TFA, was cost savings due to improved health outcomes. This ruling says that those cost savings cannot be taken into account, which in turn means the original rule can and should be over turned. When it's challenged in court if the first ruling about cost savings (the one their doing now) is upheld then the second ruling goes down.
The reason Trump hasn't done more damage is folks have been fighting against him. He tried to end Obamacare and with it pre-existing condition protection. He was stopped only because of a massive backlash. He's tried to spend $30 billion of my tax dollars (and yours if you're American) and a wall/fence that not one expert agrees would make the slightest difference in protecting our boarders. Again, folks fought against that.
And Musk doens't have anything to do with it. That's a red herring.
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I'm not sure if you read the summary vs just the clickbait headline, but this makes no changes to mercury emissions. What has changed is that in the future, the EPA will comply with the law, as ordered by court order from 2015 regarding how they document the reasons for their decisions.
The proposed change is that in the future the EPA will publish certain data (as already required by law), rather than obscuring the data by lumping unrelated things together.
The summary hints at what's actually going on when the summary says:
-- ...
President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future [without publishing their data regarding the new regulation they made up]
---
Here's what happened. Under the Obama administration, certain people in the White House asked the EPA to put new regulations on coal. By law, when making new regulations, the EPA has to publish an analysis of the week benefits and costs. Their analysis concluded that further reducing mercury emissions would cost $9.6 billion and the benefits would be - minimal. Oops, that's a problem. It would be much more effective to spend $9.6 billion on nutritional education, anti-smoking, or any of many other choices, if you wanted to improve public health. Instead of having the coal plants pay $10 billion for mercury filters, it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
But the White House wanted regulations on coal, not breastfeeding related programs or anything else that would have been more effective, get more bang for the buck. So what's the EPA to do? Issue the regulation while attaching their studies showing that their regulation was stupid?
The way the EPA dealt with this problem is they guessed that if they required more mercury reduction, coal plants *might* ALSO make drastic reductions to other emissions, including particulates and many others. The EPA study said that if the plants greatly reduced all of these other things, that would be good for public health. These other possible benefits that have nothing whatsoever to do with mercury would be significant, far greater than the minimal benefit related to mercury. So the EPA published numbers showing a) the cost of mercury reduction and b) the total benefits of greatly reducing particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, etc. They didn't publish their numbers for mercury because they were embarrassingly low.
In 2015 the court ruled that the EPA hadn't followed the law. If they are going to make a regulation on mercury emissions, they have to publish their estimates of the cost and benefits of mercury emissions reduction. They can't hide it by adding in a bunch of unrelated stuff and lumping it all together, the court ruled.
The EPA now proposes to follow the law, as they have been to ordered by the court, and publish their estimates for the costs and benefits of any new regulations - and only for the regulation, not a lump sum assuming a bunch of other new regulations.
Btw of you read up on the case, you will also find that they *knew* that what they were doing was unlawful and improper, but they did so at the insistence of a White House VIP.
If you really want to argue that the EPA administrators are wrong, that they only thought it was wrong to intentionally obscure legally required disclosures based on political pressure, I suppose you can try to make some logical argument why that's the right thing to do. Until you do so, I'm inclined to believe the people who did it, who should be experts at their job, when they decided this was improper so they should avoid mentioning the name of the White House VIP in any written correspondence. The judge who saw all of the evidence indicated it was not only unlawfully done, but knowingly unlawful.
I'll be happy to read any reasoned argument you have to make to the contrary, or view any evidence. Do you perhaps have some evidence that the court didn't see, suggesting that anyone involved thought that hiding the data was proper or even legal?
Here in Canada, every time I go to the equivalent of the DMV, usually to get by drivers license renewed, there's less then a couple of people in front of me and I'm seeing someone in minutes, in and out in about 10 minutes.
I think the problem is the voters voting in people who believe government is bad and do their best to make it true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
What you are referring to is a different issue entirely.
This isn't about personal data.
In this case, someone at the White House asked the EPA to put forth some new regulations on coal that would be hard to comply with. Reducing mercury levels by another 90% would be difficult and expensive ($10 billion / year, according to the EPA under Obama), so that's what the White House person asked the EPA to do. Before making that rule, the EPA is legally required to release the results of their analysis of the costs and benefits of mercury reduction at those levels.
It turns out, the EPA analysis found that further mercury reduction wasn't the best way to improve public health - not by a long shot. It would be far better to reduce the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates, the EPA analysis found. That presented a problem for the EPA. Particulates can be reduced with a simple passive filter - they are literally particles. That wasn't what the White House VIP* wanted, but if the EPA released their analysis about mercury levels as required it would make their new regulation look stupid. So the EPA had a problem - release their study and look stupid, or not issue the regulation and piss off White House VIP.
Their solution was to draft an analysis of the cost of mercury reduction and the benefits of reducing particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury. Less than 10% of the expected benefits were from reducing mercury, which was what the new regulation required.
This went to court in 2015 and the court ruled that the law says the EPA has to release their analysis of mercury levels. They aren't allowed to obscure the facts they came up with by mixing in benefits if particulates were also reduced, and sulfur dioxide, etc. When they issue a regulation saying mercury has to be reduced by 90%, they are legally required to release their analysis of what benefits and costs reduced mercury levels would have.
* If you thought about who in the White House was trying to punish coal-producing states and guessed that White House VIP was expected to become the next president, you've made the same guess a lot of people have.
> But you seem to be implying Obama intentionally attacked the coal industry
I don't think White House VIP is Obama. So no, nothing to do with Obama. The identity of VIP isn't publicly known, but probably most people familiar with the evidence in the case think it's Hillary. Doesn't really matter now, what matters is that the government should follow the law they create for the rest of us to follow.
> no safe level of mercury exposure. It builds up in the body over time. It's why pregnant women aren't supposed to eat fish.
And yet you're not wearing a biohazard suit to protect yourself from mercury in the world. You've (quite reasonably) decided to expose yourself to mercury and a lot of other much more dangerous things. Pros and cons. You've made a reasonable decision that it's not worth it. You could also spend $50,000 sealing up your house to keep mercury out, but that would be silly because if you were going to spend $50,000 being safer, you'd spend it on a safer car, more smoke detectors, etc. You want to avoid mercury, and you've already done the reasonable things - like not using mercury oral thermometers. Spending half your salary every year to be even safer from mercury would be unreasonable, in your analysis.
> Based on what I know about mercury (albeit not a huge amount) I'm with Obama on this one.
Not knowing much about mercury isn't a problem in this discussion. You can decide this without knowing anything about mercury, because there is no question about mercury up for discussion. The question is whether the government should follow the law and reveal what they know. The EPA knows about mercury, they did a big analysis of studies about mercury. The question a whether they should unlawfully hide that analysis when the results aren't pleasing to White House VIP, whoever that is.
You asked for a citation. To start with, here's the Supreme Court ruling saying what the EPA did was unlawful.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/o...
The SCOTUS ruling talks a lot about law, and specifically the specific point of law that SCOTUS chose to address, after the trial court and appeals court handled other issues of law. Issues of fact are handled by the trial court. You can use the case title to find the documents from the trial court for further information on the facts.
Nobody is saying the EPA can't regulate mercury emissions. The law says that when they regulate something, they have to release their analysis, which has to at least arguably show three things, all the while giving the EPA the benefit of the doubt (the law assumes the EPA is right if the analysis shows it's debatable). The EPA has to show that:
They considered the benefits of the proposed regulation
The considered the costs
The proposed regulation could be reasonably be expected to accomplish a lawful goal of the agency
After releasing their analysis they then have to have a comment period in which the public may comment on the analysis, pointing out any major flaws such as if it missed the primary costs, pointing better wording that would be more effective, etc. It's illegal for them to put a regulation in place and say "we don't care what the costs are, and we're not going to give anyone a chance to see our analysis or comment on it. Someone from the White House wants this, so they're going to get it - scientific analysis and the law be damned". That's not legal.
You're guessing the benefits are several thousand times higher than what the EPA analysis predicted. Do you have any evidence, any reason to think that?
From EPAs own website:
In 2016, these proposed rules would avoid:
6,800 â" 17,000 premature deaths
4,500 cases of chronic bronchitis
11,000 nonfatal heart attacks
12,200 hospital and emergency room visits
11,000 cases of acute bronchitis
220,000 cases of respiratory symptoms
850,000 days when people miss work
120,000 cases of aggravated asthma, and 5.1 million days when people must restrict their activities
EPA estimates the health benefits associated with reduced exposure to fine particles are $59 billion to $140 billion in 2016 (2007$).
Source:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/prod...