The Environmental Protection Agency will allow states to set their own emission standards for coal-fueled power plants. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a proposal that calls for states to regulate emissions from power plants. Critics say the decision will result in much more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
It’s unclear what else is in the Trump plan, but a President who talked about ending “the war on beautiful, clean coal” in this year’s State of the Union address will most certainly scale back one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies — on the heels of plans to weaken fuel economy targets and a revision ofcoal ash regulations.
Experts say that such a move could be detrimental to America’s health.
The Obama era Clean Power Plan set a standard aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. It made those emissions federally regulated for the first time
Power plants are the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, making up roughly a third of the domestic greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. The plants also create large amounts of fine particulate matter. The particles can get trapped deep in the lungs, causing breathing problems, heart disease and inflammation.
Exposure to air pollution is known to lead to ahost of health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer, bone loss, blood vessel damage, inflammation, cognitive issues and even death.
In 2016, the Supreme Court blocked the Obama regulation, but some plants had already started to work on reducing pollution.
With the repeal of the regulation, that progress is most likely going to stop, experts say, and that will hurt the country’s health.
“There is no such thing as a safe level of pollution. It’s that simple. Any pollution is bad. There is no doubt about this,” saidDr. Andrea Baccarelli, chairman of the Environmental Health Sciences Department at Columbia University, adding that reducing the standard by any amount will have negative health consequences. “It’s clear that relaxing the standards could cost lives.”
The country has had a much better track record on regulating pollution in recent decades.
“Across the country, it’s remarkable what we’ve been able to do in the last 40 years, and there’s substantial evidence of improvement, which has a large impact on our health,” said C. Arden Pope III, an air pollution expertand the Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University. “Rolling back these pollution standards puts our progress at risk. At worst, progress could be reversed.”
Reducing pollution lowers people’s risk for disease and even increases life expectancy, studies show. But lowering the standards by replacing the Clean Power Plan with something less stringent will bring an estimated 36,000 additional deaths and an estimated 630,000 cases of respiratory ailments in children over a decade, according to one analysis published in June in the medical journal JAMA. That, some experts said, is probably a conservative estimate.
“I’m a little skeptical about quantifying the health impact. We have models that can show range, but certainly this will have a negative health impact, no matter what the number,” said Tom McGarity, an environmental law expert and the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law at the University of Texas. “There is no question a rollback will have a negative impact on mortality.”
Some of these “big dirties,” as the old polluting plants are called, lack the technology to reduce the amount of pollution they create according to McGarity. They will probably stick around a lot longer with the Trump administration’s plans — and will continue to contribute to climate change, increasing incidents of heat stroke, tropical disease and wildfires.
Natural gas and renewable energies like solar and wind have come down in price which has slowed the need for coal.
“But as the administration is doing everything in its power to keep the coal industry alive, we will still see a negative impact on health,” McGarity said.
