"Polluters have long exaggerated the cost of new regulations and downplayed their benefits. Now, the Trump administration is turning that approach into policy as it seeks to slash regulations governing power plant emissions and weaken other environmental laws."
"When Tom Jorling was a Senate aide helping to draft the Clean Air Act in 1970, he often listened to executives from the nation’s biggest car companies warn that the law’s pollution-cutting requirements would put them out of business.
But during a break from one such meeting, an auto engineer told him the bosses were lying: Detroit had the expertise to make its cars much cleaner. “We can do whatever you want us to do,” Jorling recalls the technician saying. “But the executive leadership kept up with their mantra that it’s so expensive, and it’s going to threaten their viability.”
Exaggerating the costs of new regulations and understating their benefits has long been a favorite strategy in the polluters’ playbook. Now, experts say, the Trump administration wants to turn that approach into Environmental Protection Agency policy. It is pushing to rewrite the cost-benefit calculation that underpins an Obama-era rule on emissions of mercury, arsenic, and other hazardous metals from coal-fired power plants. The EPA wants to use a new, much narrower estimate of the 2011 rule’s health benefits to withdraw the legal designation that the regulation is “appropriate and necessary.”"
Beth Gardiner reports for Yale Environment 360 June 6, 2019.
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