When President Barack Obama unveiled his plan to pare emissions from U.S. power plants two years ago, he stressed the long-term health benefits: 3,600 fewer premature deaths, 90,000 fewer asthma attacks in children and a decline in hospital visits.
Now, the Trump administration is justifying its rollback of the Clean Power Plan by arguing its predecessor exaggerated the public health gains.
The Environmental Protection Agency will formally begin undoing Obama’s plan on Tuesday, a process that includes revising some of its underlying calculations to emphasize costs and minimize benefits. Among the casualties: long-held conclusions about how microscopic air pollution jeopardizes human health.
“They are putting their thumb on the scales and changing the math enough so they can say the costs aren’t justified for the Clean Power Plan,” said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group that supports the initiative. “It’s a game of trying to reach a predetermined outcome.”
The exercise is necessary because the 71-year-old Administrative Procedure Act that governs federal rulemaking bars policy pivots that are “arbitrary and capricious.” That means agencies must provide good legal and policy explanations for rescinding regulations. The Trump administration is set to do the same thing to justify repealing other Obama-era rules, including limits on methane leaks from oil wells.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said on Monday the administration was about to take the first formal step to repeal the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The initiative mandated states make broad changes in their overall electricity mix, mostly by displacing coal-fired power plants with that from wind, solar and natural gas.
“The rule really was about picking winners and losers,” Pruitt told a group of coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky. “The past administration was unapologetic: They were using every bit of power every bit of authority to use the EPA to pick winners and losers in how we generate electricity in this country — and that’s wrong.”
In proposing to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration is asserting that the EPA overstepped its legal authority in forcing sweeping changes in the nation’s energy mix, while relying on a cost-benefit analysis that was “highly uncertain” and “controversial” in the way it linked air pollution to sickness and premature death.
The replacement analysis acts to increase the potential costs of complying with the rule while downplaying the benefits it would deliver to public health and the environment.
The previous EPA assumed significant health benefits would spring from reducing the amount of soot that is belched from coal plants. When inhaled, that fine particulate matter — 1/70th the width of human hair — can penetrate deep into lungs and sometimes into the blood stream, exacerbating heart and lung diseases, causing asthma attacks and sometimes leading to premature death.
The EPA has historically said there is no safe threshold for particulate matter, a conclusion that dovetails with a series of public health studies and underlies a host of other federal regulations governing power plant pollution.