The first Trump administration repealed a bunch of public health regulations, then Trump lost his re-election bid, and the Biden administration reinstated many of them, he said. Now, they are not just repealing them “but burning them to the ground,” in an effort to make it incredibly hard for a future administration to come back in and re-regulate public health pollution, Hoover said. “It’s really quite pernicious.”
EPA spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment about what science they are using to support the claim that greenhouse gas emissions don’t contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.
The climate and health benefits of the Carbon Pollution Standards “substantially outweigh the compliance costs,” Biden’s EPA announced in June 2024. The agency pointed to a regulatory impact analysis that projected reductions of 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, the equivalent of preventing nearly a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector or avoiding the annual emissions of 328 million gas-powered cars.
The entire regulatory framework is based on cost-benefit analyses, Hoover said. But so far, the Trump administration is “heavily discounting, if not completely refusing” to quantify public health benefits in regulations, he said.
In announcing the power plant regulations repeal, Trump’s EPA said only that, by unleashing coal and natural gas, its new rule will save $310 billion, and its proposal to rescind “every remaining greenhouse gas standard for the power sector” would save an additional $370 million in direct compliance costs. It also said the rules would save American families and businesses billions more.
Independent studies, however, have reported that coal power is driving higher utility costs for consumers. And elevated emissions of toxic air contaminants triggered by the repeal would lead to increases in health damages costing up to $476 billion, according to a cost-benefit analysis by the nonprofit group Resources for the Future.
The two largest sources of climate emissions in the United States are the power and transportation sectors, Hoover said. “And with today’s regulatory rollback, the Trump administration has now finished its work to end the climate regulations on both.”
Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover, and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, and Association of Food Journalists.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.