Here we go again. While Republicans continued their whining and whimpering about how unfair Democrats are being to confessed outlaw Donald Trump in their impeachment inquiry, one of the reasons they’re defending the man was noted by Lisa Friedman at The New York Times Thursday. Namely, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce yet another rollback of an Obama era regulation. That regulation, five years in the making, was designed to force owners of coal-fired power plants to protect people’s health by investing in equipment to reduce the toxins that their operations discharge into local waterways. This would, President Obama’s regulators said, cut 1.4 billion tons of toxic metals and other dangerous chemicals from tainting creeks and rivers.
Coal ash, the residue from burning coal, is stored at more than 1,100 locations around the nation, with about 130 million tons being added each year. Unlike emissions of carbon dioxide, which many climate science deniers consider a good thing, nobody doubts the dangers of the chemicals in coal ash—including arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium, among others. All are associated with birth defects and stunted brain growth in children. But the list of damages they can cause is far longer and includes cancer, heart damage, lung disease, respiratory distress, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, and behavioral problems.
Hundreds of ash storage pits don’t even have a simple liner to help prevent toxins from leaching into waterways. According to a 2010 EPA assessment, people who live within a mile of unlined coal ash ponds have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer. That’s more than 2,000 times higher than what the EPA considers acceptable. Tainting of the water mostly happens in a trickle. But, occasionally, as in the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant’s sudden release of 1.1 billion gallons of coal slurry in Tennessee, or the leakage of 82,000 tons of coal ash into North Carolina’s Dan River, the contamination comes in a catastrophic rush.
The Obama coal regulation, finalized in 2015, set minimum structural standards for landfills and disposal ponds, and mandated that they be monitored for leaks. It would be each utility company’s responsibility to reinforce or close old ponds that leaked. New ponds and landfills would have to be lined from the get-go.
The regulation was meant to go into effect in 2018. But when Scott Pruitt, the Trump regime’s first EPA administrator, came on board two years ago, he delayed the implementation of the regulation until 2020, saying he wanted to “give relief” to coal burners. Probably, the plan all along was to turn the pause into an erasure, and that’s what’s reportedly coming before November is over. As with other attempted rollbacks, this one is certain to face litigation that likely won’t be settled until Trump is out of office.
From Friedman:
Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, described the Obama-era measure as part of an effort to “kill coal” and said the proposed rollback would give utilities more flexibility.
“It was a back door way to force utilities to close coal-fired power plants because they had no way of disposing of coal ash,” he said. “This is an important step toward putting the various sources of electricity back on a more level playing field.”
Nonsense. This is a step backward designed to keep dumping the economic externalities of health perils and financial costs onto the people and communities being polluted instead of the polluters.
As environmental activists expected, the 2015 rule fell short of what is needed to effectively deal with coal ash. For instance, the EPA failed to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, which it obviously is. But unlike the proposed retreat being announced next month, the Obama era’s rule actually was a step forward, albeit a modest one.