Today, Trump Is Scaling Back Rules Restricting Air And Water Pollution

Last week, Roland made an announcement: we're done with India. I've been there at least half a dozen times since 1970-- once for over a year-- so I wasn't especially disturbed by the proclamation but I asked why. He said that the air pollution is so deadly in the major cities that it was absolutely unsafe. He has some app he uses that measures air pollution around the world. Last week when the fires in California had driven L.A.'s pollution levels into "unhealthy" (150 was the number and we were supposed to not go outside), the Delhi number was 999, and would have been higher had the app gone into 4 digits. Over the weekend, The Economist backed Roland up. "As part of a 'public-health emergency' declared on November 1st in Delhi, millions of face-masks are being distributed to children. Schools will shut until at least November 5th. The cause is polluted air, which Delhi’s chief minister says has turned the city into a 'gas chamber'. The measures are severe but not unusual. In the past year, schools around the world-- in Thailand and Malaysia, Mexico and America-- have cancelled classes on bad-air days. Air pollution does indeed do terrible things to schoolchildren. Globally, says the World Health Organisation, more than 90% of children under 15 breathe air that puts their health at serious risk. The young are especially susceptible, because their lungs are still developing and their breathing is faster than adults’, so they take in more pollutants relative to their body weight. A British study found that on school-runs young children were exposed to 30% more pollutants than the adults accompanying them, because their height puts them closer to exhaust pipes. One of the most common ailments that results is asthma. Poorer children are still more vulnerable, since their schools tend to be near busy roads."

Children’s brains are also at risk. This is not because pollution confines them to home. Assiduous teachers in Malaysia and China may instruct students online on days when the smog keeps them away from school. In any case, research in 2014 by the Harvard Kennedy School into the effect of shutting schools because of snow shows that missing a few days does not appear to impair learning.

Much more dangerous is the toll that pollution takes on cognitive development and mental health. Research, also conducted in 2014, found that air pollution harmed Israeli students' exam performance. A study in Cincinnati, Ohio, showed an increase in pollution to be correlated with a higher number of psychiatric-hospital visits by children troubled by anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Even very young students are aware of the pollution problem: in a survey by Sustrans, a charity that aims to reduce car use, 45% of British pupils aged four to 11 said they were worried about air quality. Such “eco-anxiety” is the reason that some American school boards are riven by disagreements between environmentalists, who maintain that children need to understand climate change, and administrators who say studying it will traumatise them.

Clean-air campaigners have tried to stem the damage. In Britain, for example, they have, besides encouraging student pick-ups and drop-offs on foot or by bicycle, recommended imposing no-car zones around schools in Birmingham, or, in Sheffield, placing hedges between roads and playgrounds. Such measures are no substitute for bigger changes, though. If trends persist, warns the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, air pollution will cut 1% from global GDP by 2060, in large part from lost agricultural yield, lower worker productivity and higher health costs. Apart from choking on the fumes, today’s school children can look forward to bearing those burdens, too.

None of that bothers Señor Trumpanzee in the least. He has an election to win and he believes there's a constituency that demands deadly air pollution, particularly coal burning pollution. Yesterday, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, reported for Washington Post readers on how Trump is working diligently to hamper cognitive development among children and worsen mental health in our own country. Today, the EPA is relaxing "rules that govern how power plants store waste from burning coal and release water containing toxic metals into nearby waterways. The proposals, which scale back two rules adopted in 2015, affect the disposal of fine powder and sludge known as 'coal ash,' as well as contaminated water that power plants produce while burning coal. Both forms of waste can contain mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals that pose risks to human health and the environment." Take that, Obama!

The new Trumpist rules reflect Trumpanzee’s "broader goal of bolstering America’s coal industry at a time when natural gas and renewable energy provide more affordable sources of electricity for consumers. Under the Obama-era rule, coal ash ponds leaking contaminants into groundwater that exceeded federal protection standards had to close by April 2019. The Trump administration extended that deadline until October 2020 in a rule it finalized last year. In August 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit instructed the EPA to require that companies overhaul ponds, including those lined with clay and compacted soil, even if there was no evidence that sludge was leaking into groundwater.

In a statement, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the Obama-era rules “placed heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country.”

Andrew Wheeler by Nancy Ohanian

“These proposed revisions support the Trump administration’s commitment to responsible, reasonable regulations,” Wheeler said, “by taking a common-sense approach that will provide more certainty to U.S. industry while also protecting public health and the environment.”

... [I]f a company can demonstrate that it is shutting down a coal boiler, it can petition to keep its storage ponds open for as long as eight years, depending on their size. Slurry ponds smaller than 40 acres could get approval to stay in place until Oct. 15, 2023, officials said, while larger ones could remain open until Oct. 15, 2028.

Environmentalists have sharply criticized the proposals, arguing these containment sites pose serious risks to the public at a time when more frequent and intense flooding, fueled in part by climate change, could destabilize them and contaminate drinking water supplies that serve millions of people. The rules will be subject to public comment for 60 days.

During the past decade, Tennessee and North Carolina have experienced major coal ash spills that have destroyed homes and contaminated rivers, resulting in sickened cleanup workers and massive lawsuits.

The question of how to handle coal waste, which is stored in roughly 450 sites across the country, has vexed regulators for decades. The Obama administration negotiated for years with environmental groups, electric utilities and other affected industries about how to address the waste, which can poison wildlife and poses health risks to people living near storage sites.

Lisa Evans, an attorney specializing in hazardous waste law for the environmental group Earthjustice, said allowing the electric industry to extend the life of coal ash pits represents a particular threat to low-income and minority Americans, who often live near such installations.

“Allowing plants to continue to dump toxic waste into leaking coal ash ponds for another 10 years will cause irreversible damage to drinking water sources, human health and the nation’s waters,” Evans said in an email. She added it was not surprising the coal industry had lobbied against closing these storage sites. “Operating ponds is cheap. Closing them costs the utilities money,” she said.

It is also likely to add to ordinary consumers’ costs. Last year, for example, a member of the Virginia State Corporation Commission estimated it could cost ratepayers as much as $3.30 a month over 20 years-- between $2.4 billion and $5.6 billion-- to clean up Virginia-based Dominion Energy’s 11 coal ash ponds and six coal ash landfills in the state.

The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, which lobbies on coal ash issues on behalf of electric utilities, said in its 2017 petition that the Obama-era rules were “burdensome, inflexible, and often impracticable” and that they “created a monolithic, one-size-fits-all regulatory regime.”

Delia Patterson, general counsel of the American Public Power Association, said the proposed rules would “bring more certainty to the industry and facilitate the safe management” of waste ponds.

...The vast majority of ponds and landfills holding coal waste at hundreds of power plants across the country have leaked toxic chemicals into nearby groundwater at facilities from Texas to Pennsylvania to Maryland, according to that analysis. The report acknowledged, however, that the groundwater data alone does not prove drinking-water supplies near the coal waste facilities have been contaminated. Power companies are not routinely required to test nearby drinking water wells. “So the scope of the threat is largely undefined,” the report stated.

The EPA on Monday will also revise requirements for how power plants discharge wastewater, which contain some of the same kind of contaminants. Under the Obama administration, EPA staff had concluded it was feasible to prohibit any releases of such toxic materials by having the units continually recycle their water. The agency has now concluded this is far more costly than originally anticipated, and technological advances have made it cheaper to filter and capture the waste through a membrane system, officials said.

Under the new rule, plants would be allowed to discharge 10 percent of their water each day, on a 30-day rolling average. The administration projects that the regulation would prevent 105 million pounds of pollutants from being released compared with the old standards because 18 affected plants would voluntarily adopt a more advanced filtration system. The administration also estimated it would save the industry $175 million each year in compliance costs and yield an additional $15 million to $69 million in annual public health and environmental benefits.

However, even if the 18 plants voluntarily adopted more advanced filtration techniques, they represent a minority of the nation’s total number of plants.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland, former director of science and technology at the EPA’s Office of Water, said the proposed rule “relaxes the 2015 treatment requirements allowing increased selenium discharges and [the] release of contaminated water from coal ash handling. Even worse, it exempts a large number of plants from these relaxed requirements, allowing them to discharge more pollutants and continue disposing of ash in leaking ponds.”

Evans said environmentalists are likely to challenge the new rule on coal ash storage and the federal government could again reverse course if a Democrat wins the presidency next year. She noted that, because 95 percent of coal ash ponds remain unlined, two-thirds lie within five feet of groundwater and 92 percent leak more than federal health standards allow, they could pose a risk to the public even as litigation winds its way through the federal courts.

“We have to hope that no wells are poisoned and no toxic waste is spilled in the interim,” she said. “Crossing your fingers is not a legal or sane way to regulate toxic waste.”

ScienceAlert warned last month that air pollution had gotten significantly worse in the U.S. since Trump occupied the White House, "a reversal after years of sustained improvement with significant implications for public health. In 2018 alone, eroding air quality was linked to nearly 10,000 additional deaths in the US relative to the 2016 benchmark, the year in which small-particle pollution reached a two-decade low, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University... Last year, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded the expert academic panel that reviewed and advised the agency on its standards for small-particle air pollution. In its place, the administration has hired consultants with links to the fossil fuel, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries... One thing that's clear at the moment is the effect that rising pollution is having on mortality and life expectancy."

Two congressional candidates from Chicago had a lot to say about Trump's-- and conservatives' in general-- love affair with pollution-for-profit and how it impacts the families in their neighborhoods. Kina Collins: "In the predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods in IL-07, we see food deserts with a lack of fresh produce, industrial corridors pumping toxins into the air, and some areas that have higher levels of lead in the water than Flint, Michigan. In Chicago, there are hotspots where Black children are dying from asthma attacks at eight times the rate of white children because of the air quality and healthcare inequities. This is an environmental crisis. We need to be increasing funding for the EPA and other agencies to immediately and aggressively combat the causes of climate change, not cutting back on regulations and giving tax breaks to polluters. We cannot separate environmental justice from economic justice, and I plan to bring training and opportunities for green jobs into the south and west sides of Chicago so that they do not get left behind as we push to become the world leaders in the green industry. And we need leaders who are at the forefront of Congress pushing for the Green New Deal, who are actually fighting for Generation GND. We can afford to invest in the infrastructure and clean technology needed to end problems like lead in the water, we just need to have the moral authority to put the money where it is needed most. We don't need a Congressman who sits on the sidelines, because our planet doesn't have 20 more years to 'wait and see.' I will be fighting for environmental justice policies from Day One like my life depends on it-- because the future matters to me and to millions of other young Americans who are ready for bold action."

Marie Newman is also running for a seat held by a Democrat who doesn't seem to give a damn about corporate pollution. "With the undeniable amount of rebuilding and work we will have to do to address the climate crisis, my opponent’s lack of understanding and dismissal of the climate crisis alongside the amount of funding he is getting from the fossil fuel industries is truly disturbing. We must push past dinosaurs like Lipinski and get progressives elected ASAP. It is why I’m running."