Calling it the “largest deregulator action in the history of the United States”, the Environmental Protection Agency launched radical movements on Wednesday with the aim of walking back to environmental protections and eliminating a series of climate change regulations, a few decades in creation.
Together, the agency’s actions indicate a wholesale agency’s wholesale reorientation away from government renewable energy support, carbon reduction programs and air, water and soil regulations, while threatening to gut the previous scientific findings of the government in the nucleus of most climatic regulations.
The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, launched more than two dozen policy ads, through a series of press releases and public statements. The list of proposed changes includes emission regulations on coal, oil and gas and a promise to work in federal agencies to reevaluate the finding of the government that determined that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, not only heat the planet, but are a threat to public health.
The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, speaks in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, 2025.
Rebecca Droke, pool through Reuters, file
“We are leading a dagger directly to the heart of the religion of climate change to reduce the cost of living for American families, unleash US energy, bring car works to the United States and more,” Zeldin wrote in a statement on the EPA website.
The reaction of the environmental community was rapid.
“If they go out with their own, they will destroy our air, our water, burn our houses and deliver to future generations a non -friendly climate. Of the mothers in the 1970s who wanted their children to play outside without obtaining asthma to young people in the 2020s in the strike of hung For these regulations of young people “, young people” the young people clarified the Congress.
“Corporate pollutants are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA only gave them a free pass to throw unlimited climatic contamination, the consequences will be convicted. The Biden administration put the first carbon limits in dirty plants of coal Evergreen Senior Power Poly Policly Charles Harper Sector wrote in a statement.
The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is shown in Washington, DC, on February 18, 2025.
Bonnie Cash/Upi through Shuttersock
The changes in the rules and regulations announced on Wednesday will still have to go through the federal regulatory process and will probably have to face numerous judicial challenges of environmental groups. However, the burst of actions of today meets the promises of the president’s campaign to gut many of the established rules and regulations for a long time created initially to protect our water, air, soil and human health.
Found in danger
One of the most important ads was that EPA would participate in the “formal reconsideration” of the agency’s danger finding.
In 2009, the EPA issued a “danger finding” that determines that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and others, represent a danger to public health and the environment. This ruling, caused by the decision of the 2007 Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA, gave the EPA the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Law (CAA).
This finding represents the legal basis for many regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, including emission standards for vehicles, energy plants and oil and gas production, all of which Zeldin said that the agency would also reevaluate as it reconsider the finding.
If the Trump administration decides that the danger of danger is no longer applicable and that the determination survives judicial challenges, the 16 years of emission regulations, including those promulgated under President Biden, could be in danger.
Vehicle emission standards
Zeldin also pointed to the vehicle standards of the Biden era, saying that the EPA would finish the escape tube emission regulations announced by the previous administration last year.
Although the Trump administration has repeatedly referred to these standards as an EV EV, the Biden administration established such mandate.
The Biden Environmental Protection Agency implemented the Tail Pipe emission standards last March that established an average emission average throughout the vehicle fleet offered by a vehicle manufacturer. The standards would only have affected the cars of the years model 2027 to 2032 and allowed a range of usable technologies, including totally electric, hybrid cars and internal combustion motors improved. These standards apply to light and medium service vehicles. A separate set of standards for high -resistance vehicles was released.
As Zeldin’s EPA announced the reconsideration of these standards, issued a statement by saying: the regulations imposed, “$ 700 billion in regulatory and compliance costs,” claiming that they were taken: “The ability of Americans to choose a safe and affordable car for their family and increases the cost of living in all products that meet the trucks.”
Impact on coal
Another policies that are being reconsidered is the “Clean Energy Plan 2.0”, which is directed to the emissions of the electricity and natural gas power plants.
In this file of May 4, 2021, people fish along the dike of the city of Texas in front of the refineries within the industrial complex of the city of Texas, including Marathon and Valero, in Texas City, Texas.
Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle through Getty Images, Archive
At that time, the agency said that the new regulations would represent a massive reduction in pollution and save hundreds of billions of dollars in climatic and public health costs, since it would force electricity plants to control 90% of their carbon contamination through methods such as carbon capture and hardened emissions standards for toxic metals such as mercury that are released coal.
In one of the many press releases sent on Wednesday, the EPA described the “overreach” and “an attempt to close the generation of affordable and reliable electricity in the United States, raising prices for US families and increasing the country’s dependence on foreign energy forms.”
Social carbon cost
Also among the 31 actions announced by the agency is a review of the “social cost of carbon”, and Zeldin said that the previous administration used the metric to “advance its climate agenda in a way that imposed important costs.”
In 2010, the EPA under then President Barack Obama launched its first estimate for what it called the “social cost of carbon” or SC-CO2. This metric intended to capture long -term damage created by carbon dioxide emissions every year.
In effect, the cost of damages related to climate change, including changes in agricultural productivity, human health, property damage due to the greatest risk of flooding, changes in energy costs and other considerations.
The Biden administration then updated the estimate process to include the consideration of additional factors, which leads to an increase in national SC-CO2. In December 2023, the EPA BIDEN updated the metric at a dramatically high rate: $ 190 per ton of carbon, compared to the previous estimate of the administration of $ 51 per ton.
“To boost the great American return, we are completely committed to eliminating regulations stopping the United States,” Zeldin said in the announcement.
