EPA offers a way to avoid clean air bases: send an email

Last year, the Biden administration required power plants that burn coal and oil To reduce emissions significantly One of the toxic chemicals including mercury, which can harm children’s brains and cause heart disease in adults.

Now, the Trump administration provides companies with unusual companies: Send an email, and may be given permission by President Trump to overcome new restrictions, as well as other major clean air bases.

The Environmental Protection Agency said this week that it was calling for a mysterious section of Clean air law This enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial facilities from new bases if the technology required to meet these rules is not available, or if they are in the interest of national security.

In its notification to the companies, the agency provided a template for companies for use for approvals, including what you write in the email line line. “The president will make a decision on the women,” said the notification issued by the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.

Joseph Goveman, the former CEO of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law Faculty, who served as assistant director of the Environmental Protection Agency for air pollution during the era of President Joseph R. Biden Junior, he is afraid that President Trump will “create a rubber stamps” that allow companies to avoid a long list of bases to pollute air.

He said that he usually said, the agency has set more specific criteria for the base exemptions. He also said that Congress was clearly intended for the exemptions of clean air law with the conditions that would guarantee at least some boundaries of pollution.

Mr. Joufman said: “Due to the lack of any of this, it strongly indicates that the decisions will be dedicated at best.” “This is a defiance of the purpose of Congress, in challenging the general health needs of affected societies, and in limiting the previous practices of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Molly Vaslele, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, was going back against this opinion, saying that any place in the law was not a clear condition for such conditions. This type of “legal analysis” appears consistent with persons responsible “for the interpretations of laws in the Supreme Court It has been struckShe said in an email.

The latest policy of companies allows for a request for exemptions up to two years, which is the maximum allowed under the clean air law, from many new restrictions on toxic chemical emissions such as mercury and arsenic, As well as ethylene oxideColorless gas is widely used to sterilize medical devices, which is also a carcinogenic substance.

Mr. Zilden, a former member of Congress from New York, also said that he would allow power plants that burn coal to apply for exemptions from a new base that requires them to be addressed Health risks for charcoal ashA toxic substance created by burning coal to produce electricity.

The agency said that it intends to rewrite many of these same rules, and it is an arduous process that is expected to take some time. Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to follow “a two -step process, as it says it will take the next few years for the decline in rules”, but in the meantime the companies that have to meet any of them, James Pio, the director of clean air practices at EntervioreVice environmental.

“It is difficult to imagine how these exemptions can be legal,” said Mr. Pio. For all new rules, for example, the Biden administration has already set an alternative technology that was available at reasonable prices. He said that the idea that the ability to pollute was in the national interest was difficult to buy.

As of Thursday, it was not clear whether the agency had begun to receive exemption requests, and whether any of them had been granted, and if it would be revealed. The Environmental Protection Agency said companies must apply for exemptions by the end of the month.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the American Chemistry Council, which represents the main organized industries, did not respond immediately for suspension.