CLIMATE CHANGE/EPA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Trump administration is withdrawing a decades-old air policy aimed at reining in some of the largest sources of hazardous pollutants like mercury and lead.
The Environmental Protection Agency said late Thursday [1-25-18] it is getting rid of requirements that it forever keep sites classified as ‘major sources’ of hazardous air pollution once they meet that classification. This ‘once-in always-in’ policy punished industry by keeping factories and other sites under heavy regulation even if they made improvements that would prevent them from being major sources of pollution, according to the EPA and lawmakers who had requested the move.
Environmentalists and congressional critics decried the change, saying it is one of the EPA’s bedrock environmental regulations that keeps polluters from trimming back to just below the major-source classification cutoff to avoid requirements that could further lower their emissions.
President Donald Trump has made a rollback of environmental regulations one of his signature issues, carrying out a main campaign promise by withdrawing or rewriting rules designed to fight climate change, coal-ash pollution and coastal flooding, among many others. It is part of a broad attempt to make oil companies, power plants and manufacturers, among several different industries, more competitive by lowering their costs…
The change will primarily help steel, paper and chemical makers among other manufacturing sites, said Jeff Holmstead, a partner at law and lobbying firm Bracewell LLP, who led the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during Mr. Bush’s first term. NRDC says hundreds of plants could be affected. The number is unclear, Mr. Holmstead said, and they would all need to go through a recertification process to benefit, he added.”
-Timothy Puko, “EPA Withdraws Air Pollution Policy,” The Wall Street Journal online, Jan. 25, 2018 09:52pm