The war on the environment

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The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed that regulating hazardous emissions from power plants is not “appropriate and necessary,” reversing Obama-era findings and exposing current emissions standards to legal challenges. To arrive at this conclusion, the agency has invented a new, unnatural way of evaluating regulatory cost that finds no support in the economics literature or in the regulatory practices of prior administrations of either political party. If the agency succeeds using its novel methodology, it will likely deploy the same strange method in other rulemakings, leading to large numbers of premature deaths and other significant adverse health consequences for the American people. 

The specific regulation under threat is the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or “MATS,” an Obama-era regulation that limits the emissions of hazardous pollutants like neurotoxic mercury, carcinogenic arsenic, and other toxins from power plants running on fossil fuels. The Clean Air Act’s section 112 gives EPA the authority to regulate hazardous emissions from these plants, so long as the agency determines that such regulation is “appropriate and necessary.” The Supreme Court held in 2015 that, in making this determination, EPA must consider the costs associated with regulation. The court left it to EPA, however, to decide how to consider cost..

EPA is rolling back protections with methodology no respectable economist would endorse | TheHill