The EPA plans to announce a new policy on Monday that will eliminate limits on power plant pollution, saddling Americans with another $120 billion in long-term health costs, in the latest step of Trump’s assault on Americans’ pocketbooks.
The news comes from a New York Times report which cites two people familiar with the proposal.
It would eliminate limits on greenhouse gas pollution, the kind of which has contributed to the wild weather much of the world is suffering from this summer, with record heat and wildfires spreading rapidly.
And so, we should probably establish some facts before going further with this article:
- The global climate is warming, and it is warming due to human activity.
- The human activity that is warming the global climate the most is fossil fuel combustion.
- There are other things warming the global climate as well, including the meat industry (both through methane emissions from livestock and through deforestation of the land to grow them and their feed), construction (cement releases significant CO2, though not as much as the previous influences), and others. But fossil fuels are the primary cause.
- That global temperature rise puts many ecosystems out of balance, with disastrous results for those ecosystems.
- Humans rely on functioning ecosystems for their most basic needs – water, air, food, temperature regulation, and so on.
- As ecosystems are disrupted, this will make humans’ lives harder and worse, and lead to greater conflict.
- The fossil fuel industry spends a lot of money and effort to deny and obfuscate these facts, and their tactics have shifted over time, retreating from a hard-line “it’s not happening” position to softer-sounding, but similarly-insidious, positions that still minimize the importance of the problem or delay action.
- The longer we wait to solve climate change, the harder and more costly it will be.
- Thus, climate change is a huge and real problem we all need to work to solve quickly, and will require collective cooperation from everyone, whether they be corporations, media, governments, or individuals.
These are all facts that no serious person contests – only people like Lee Zeldin, chief saboteur of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from fossil fuels over his political career.
Removing these limits will cost $120 billion, and cause thousands of death per year
And so, he is proposing to remove pollution limits from coal and gas power plants – the former of which is rapidly dying regardless, and the latter which is being built to power the expansion of data centers, which are enormously unpopular.
Current limits were put into place by Presidents Obama and Biden, and the current limits were set to provide $120 billion in public health benefits over the next two decades. Mr. Trump is seeking to eliminate those public health gains, increasing costs on Americans who are already saddled by high costs in every part of their lives today, with those high costs coming largely due to his policy proposals.
The rollback is set to cause thousands of premature deaths, hundreds of emergency room visits, hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, tens of thousands of missed school days and missed workdays… per year.
But the EPA currently does not acknowledge any of those negative effects of its rollbacks, since earlier this year it literally said your life is worth nothing when it stopped calculating human health impacts of its policy changes. How convenient to just be able to ignore the damage you’re causing.
What else are republicans doing to raise your costs and harm your health?
It’s part of an overall assault by Lee Zeldin on Americans’ health.
His largest attempted rollback, on fuel efficiency regulations, is set to increase costs by $1.4 trillion and raise gas prices by $.76/gallon by the administration’s own admission. So $120 billion seems like peanuts compared to that, but it all adds up.
Another effort was an attempt to block California and 16 other states from cleaning up their air, but that effort was recently blocked by a court.
And it fits into a pattern of efforts by the wider republican party to raise Americans’ energy costs. Here’s just a small sample:
- The Department of Energy has spent billions on subsidies for the failing coal industry, and tried (and failed) to force broken coal plants to stay open. In an Orwellian move, it also banned the words “climate change.”
- The Department of the Interior has illegally committed billions to buying out offshore wind developments (after getting bribed to do so), starving America of electricity. This tactic came after it first tried to shut down wind power stations that were already running (right before Christmas!), but was blocked from doing so.
- Republicans have thrown up red tape, making it harder to permit energy projects, even as America struggles with low electricity supply and high prices. That attempt was blocked by a court, but they also successfully killed incentives that had previously lowered your energy costs.
It remains to be seen whether the new policy set to be announced tomorrow will stick. It will surely be subject to legal challenges, and as you can see from above examples, those legal challenges have often overturned these republican attacks on health.
Will the courts stop this change?
Courts have been mixed on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is required by the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, so moving to refuse to regulate those emissions seems like quite a direct violation of that law. But Zeldin incorrectly claims that greenhouse gases are not harmful, and therefore that he doesn’t need to do the job Congress has required him to do.
Courts have occasionally been susceptible to similar arguments, trying to toe a middle line between following the law and allowing polluters free reign. In 2016, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was blocked by courts, despite the $155 billion it would have saved Americans this decade.
And, while many of these attacks on Americans’ health are clearly illegal on their face, the overall strategy is to throw as many things at the wall and see what sticks, hoping to get a favorable or even partially favorable ruling, allowing coal and gas plants to continue to pollute a little bit longer, and for these politically-connected industries to drain a little more wealth (and health) of the nation away and into the pockets of the elites giving the bribes.
Will this actually cause a pivot back to coal?
Whether this will have any effect on Americans’ overall energy mix is unclear. Limits on pollution were set to save Americans money compared to a baseline case, but the baseline case may be improving regardless.
Coal is not growing, and nobody is opening new coal plants – and they will continue not to open new coal plants going forward, because coal is dirty and expensive. Solar and wind account for the vast majority of new generation capacity, because they’re cheaper and better, and because nobody will look at them a few years down the line and go “hey, we want to close that, it’s making our kids sick.”
Looking beyond coal, it is possible that this new policy, if it goes into effect, could help to fuel the growth of data centers. Many of them are installing huge gas power plants just to get power onto the grid quickly, causing these data centers that are already increasing your electricity costs to increase your health costs too. If there’s another health regulation that gas plants are allowed to ignore, that could just make both of those public costs increase further.
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