Trump's EPA moves to weaken more coal-pollution rules
The Trump administration accelerated the pace of its environmental rollbacks for the country’s coal-fired power plants Monday, proposing to weaken two Obama-era rules aimed at cleaning up dangerous heavy metals and ash from coal plants and keeping them from washing into groundwater and waterways.
The other would give some utilities up to several years more to clean up or close the more than 400 unlined coal ash dumps around the country that lie within a few feet of groundwater.The rewrite serves to “insert a grab bag of loopholes into what had been a strong national set of health protections,” said Thomas Cmar, attorney for the coal program of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice.
But coal production in the U.S. has continued falling amid a boom for natural gas and some renewable energy, and U.S. coal facilities are closing despite the proposed regulatory relief. Coal magnate Robert Murray, an influential Trump donor and fundraiser who had presented the new administration with a written “action plan” of desired breaks for the coal industry, sought bankruptcy protection for his Murray Energy last week.
The nation’s largest public utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, had been trying for years to win exemption from the wastewater treatment rules for its largest coal-fired facility, arguing that it would be too expensive to bring the Cumberland Fossil Plant into compliance. The EPA rejected an exception for TVA in its 2015 wastewater rules when it determined that the benefits to human health and the environment outweighed the costs of compliance. The proposed new rules reverse course, removing any limits on the amount of selenium and nitrate and nitrite the Cumberland plant can discharge into the river.
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