The EPA aims at the protections of water, air and toxic in the context of a massive deregulation campaign

The appellant, the “greatest deregulating action in the history of the United States”, the Environmental Protection Agency deployed scanning movements on Wednesday aimed at resuming environmental protections and eliminating a multitude of regulations on climate change, a few decades of manufacturing.

Overall, the agency’s actions indicate a wholesale reorientation of the agency far from government support for renewable energies, carbon reduction programs and air, water and soil regulations while threatening to empty the government’s previous scientific results at the heart of most climate regulations.

The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, deployed more than two dozen political ads, via a series of press releases and public declarations. The list of proposed changes includes regulations on backward emissions on the production of coal, oil and gas and a promise to work in federal agencies to reassess the government which determined that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, not only heated the planet but are a threat to public health.

“We drive a dagger directly to the heart of the religion of climate change to reduce the cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring automotive jobs to the United States and even more,” Zeldin wrote in a statement on the EPA website.

The backlash of the environmental community was rapid.

“If they reach their way, they destroy our air, our water, will burn our houses and future generations in hand an unlivable climate. Moms in the 1970s who wanted their children to be able to play outside without obtaining asthma in the 2020s who hungry hunger to force the Congress to adopt a climate law, the generations of the American group, repressed for these regulations.

“Business polluters are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA has just given them a free pass to spit unlimited climate pollution, consequences to be damned. From decades, “the organization of climate advocacy Evergreen Political Action in the main energy sector, Charles Harper wrote in a press release.

Changes in the rules and regulations announced on Wednesday will still have to go through the federal regulatory process and will probably have to resist numerous judicial challenges of environmental groups. However, today’s wave of shares makes the president’s campaign promises to empty many of the long -standing rules and regulations initially created to protect our water, air, soil and human health.

Endangered

One of the most important announcements was that the EPA engaged in the “formal review” of the conclusion of the agency endangering.

In 2009, the EPA published a “endangering conclusion” decisive that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and others, represent a danger to public health and the environment. This decision, provoked by the decision of the 2007 Supreme Court in Massachusetts c. EPA, gave the EPA the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA).

This finding represents the legal under -tension for numerous regulations concerning greenhouse gas emissions, including vehicle emission standards, electric power plants and oil and gas production – which Zeldin has declared that the agency would also re -assess when it recuperates the observation.

If the Trump administration decides that the conclusion of endangerment is no longer applicable and that the decision survives judicial disputes, 16 years of regulations on emissions, including those promulgated by President Biden, could be compromised.

Vehicle emission standards

Zeldin also targeted the standards of vehicles in the Biden era, saying that EPA would end the regulations on the announced pipes announced by the previous administration last year.

Although the Trump administration has repeatedly referred to these standards of “mandate” of electric vehicles, no mandate has been set up by the Biden administration.

The Biden environmental protection agency has implemented the exhaust pipe standards last Mars which established an average emission authorized in all the vehicles offered by a vehicle manufacturer. The standards would not have had an impact on model cars 2027 to 2032 and enabled a range of usable technologies, including fully electric cars, hybrids and improved internal combustion engines. These standards apply to light and medium vehicles. A separate set of standards has been released for heavy vehicles.

While the EPA of Zeldin announced his review of these standards, he published a press release saying that the regulations imposed “$ 700 billion in regulatory and compliance costs”, alleging that they have taken “the ability of Americans to choose a safe and affordable car for their families and increases the cost of life on all the products that the trucks delivered.”

Coal impacts

Another of the reconsidered policies is the “clean energy plan 2.0”, which targets the emissions of coal and natural gas power plants.

At the time, the agency said that the new regulations would represent a massive reduction in pollution and would save hundreds of billions of dollars in climatic costs and public health, as it would require power plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution by methods such as carbon capture and tighten the standards of emissions for toxic metals such as mercury that is released from plants coal.

In one of the numerous press releases sent Wednesday, the EPA qualified the rules to “overcome” and “an attempt to close the production of affordable and reliable electricity in the United States, increase the prices of American families and increase the country’s dependence on the forms of foreign energy.”

Carbon social cost

The agency is also among the 31 actions announced by the Agency, a revision of the “social cost of the carbon”, with Zeldin claiming that the previous administration used metrics to “advance their climate program in a way that imposed major costs”.

In 2010, EPA under the president of the time, Barack Obama, published his first estimate for what she called the “social cost of carbon” or SC-CO2. This metric meant to capture long -term damage created by carbon dioxide emissions every year.

He estimated, in fact, the cost of damages linked to climate change, including changes in agricultural productivity, human health, damage to the risk of additional flooding, changes in energy costs and other considerations.

Administration Biden subsequently updated the estimate process to include taking into account additional factors, which led to an increase in the national SC-CO2. In December 2023, the Biden EPA updated metric at a considerably higher rate – $ 190 per tonne of carbon, compared to the previous estimate of the $ 51 administration per ton.

“To feed the American return, we are fully committed to deleting the regulations that hold the United States,” said Zeldin in the announcement.