WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to finalize a rule that would make it easier for oil and coal-fired power plants to release mercury and other toxic air pollutants, despite bipartisan objection and some industry pushback.
While the rule would not outright eliminate the Obama administration standards, it would alter their legal justification by recalculating the costs and benefits of the so-called Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, or MATS.
The EPA said Administrator Andrew Wheeler would make an “air policy announcement” later Thursday.
The changes come as the country combats the coronavirus, an illness more deadly to people with respiratory health problems, including those resulting from long-term pollution exposure. Mercury is linked to myriad health problems, including severe damage to the lungs, brain and other organs, and damage to fetuses.
“Our country is suffering the grave and growing loss of tens of thousands of American lives to a novel coronavirus that attacks our respiratory systems, and this EPA is advancing rules that will cause more respiratory illness,” Sen. Thomas R. Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Thursday in anticipation of the finalized rule.
In November, Carper and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., defended the Obama administration rule in a USA Today opinion piece and urged the EPA not to change its legal underpinnings, warning of the public health damage that could result.
The new rule would deem the regulations more costly than beneficial to public health, opening the door for legal challenges by coal companies that have blamed the standards for their financial troubles. Critics also say the revisions would also pave the way for the administration to write weaker rules.
“This action is an affront to public health, and the Trump administration’s justification is completely irrational,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “There is no plausible economic argument for this one-sided approach.”
When the Obama EPA finalized the rule in December 2011, it estimated it would cost utilities roughly $9.6 billion a year to comply with the rule and generate between $37 billion and $90 billion in public health benefits. The EPA’s analysis shows the rule has helped cut mercury emissions by about 86 percent since 2010.
In its proposal for the rule, the Trump EPA said it had determined that it was not “appropriate and necessary” for the agency to regulate hazardous air pollutants under certain sections of the Clean Air Act.
The National Mining Association, which challenged the mercury rule in court, applauded the changes when the EPA proposed them in 2018, calling the rule “the largest regulatory accounting fraud perpetrated on American consumers.”
As the nation grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, a group of Democrats earlier this month wrote to the EPA asking the agency to halt any action on rules aimed at rolling back clean-air protections, including the mercury and toxic pollutants rule. Still, the EPA has been working to quickly roll back clean-air protections, including tailpipe standards and earlier this week deciding not to update smog standards.
The agency has also come under fire for relaxing its enforcement of air and water pollution rules during the pandemic.
Ellen Kurlansky, who worked as an air policy analyst at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation from 1996 until 2018, described the latest action as a “gift to the coal industry at the expense of all Americans.”
She said the EPA is justifying its decision with a “phony cost-benefit analysis that purposely inflates” the cost of the rule and ignores the value of the human health benefits.
“Based on that deception, EPA says that the benefits of MATS aren’t worth the cost,” Kurlansky, who participated in the writing of the original rule, said. “Those benefits include the value of thousands of lives saved by MATS each year, hundreds of thousands of illnesses avoided each year, and avoided damage to the developing brain of the unborn.”
There will likely be court challenges from environmental and public health advocates.
Mary Anne Hitt, senior director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said the group will stand firmly against the “dangerous” decision.
“Every electric utility in our country is already in compliance with these life-saving safeguards, which makes it clear just how determined former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler is to deliver every item on the coal industry’s wish list — even if it threatens the health of pregnant women and young children,” Hitt said, in anticipation of the EPA announcement.
Some companies and industry groups have asked the EPA to leave the standards unchanged, arguing that utilities have already invested in the costly technology to comply, and changing the standards would create uncertainty and an uneven playing field.
When the EPA proposed changes to the rule in 2018, several trade groups, including the Edison Electric Institute, American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, wrote to the EPA to object.
“The industry already has invested significant capital — estimated at more than $18 billion — and states are relying on the operation of these controls for their air quality plans,” the groups wrote, urging the EPA to leave the underlying MATS rule in place and focus instead on making technical revisions to create certainty for the industry.
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