The war on the environment

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Toxic pollution standards save up to 17,000 lives per year, but the EPA wants to change how it measures benefits from these regulations, making them vulnerable to rollbacks. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed yet another weakening of an Obama-era regulation on Friday, this time targeting toxic chemicals from oil and coal-fired power plants. The regulation in question, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), was established in 2011. It was the first set of federal rules to limit hazardous pollution from coal-burning and oil-burning plants, targeting chemicals like mercury, a neurotoxin that can lead to tremors, respiratory failure, and death. Coal power plants are the biggest emitters of mercury. According to the EPA’s own projections, these rules save upward of 17,000 lives per year in the United States. The Center for American Progress found that MATS reduced mercury emissions from power plants by 81 percent since going into effect..

EPA wants to change Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants - Vox

The Trump administration is expected to propose maintaining Obama-era restrictions on mercury pollution from power plants, after hearing from electric utilities that already have spent billions of dollars to meet the requirements, Bloomberg reports. But the EPA also likely will propose changes that may make it harder to toughen mercury emissions standards in the future by withdrawing an assertion the requirements are "appropriate and necessary," a legal benchmark under the Clean Air Act. The EPA wants to recalculate the cost and benefits of the mercury rule in a way that shrinks its estimated potential health gains, according to the report, in a change that could prevent the agency from making the mercury pollution requirements more stringent in the future. By disregarding potential health benefits of cutting pollution, the new proposal would conclude that the rule’s costs exceed its benefits, which environmentalists say could preclude the EPA from counting these benefits to justify the cost of toughening requirements in the future.

EPA seen maintaining Obama coal plant rules while undercutting health gains - BlackRock Utility&Infrastructure Trust (NYSE:BUI) | Seeking Alpha