NEW YORK — The new U.S. president and Congress are taking a hard look at environmental rules — none harder than a freshman U.S. representative whose new bill would “terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Republicans have been known to threaten this from time to time, knowing that it was red meat for ideological or business interests with no real chance of success.
“Everybody hates regulation,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator and New Jersey governor, “because it makes you either spend money or change behavior for a problem you may not see.”
This year, as we all know, is a little different.
President Donald Trump has modulated his position on the EPA’s existence since the presidential campaign. And yet the concept that the pre-eminent guardian of clean air, soil, and water in the U.S. would go the way of the 20th century is now no longer the realm of fantasy.
Rule-of-thumb holds that once countries pollute their way into economic progress, they’ll pause for a second and check to see if they can still breathe the air and swim in the water. If not, they fix it. China is currently the leading example, with India coming up behind. There are fewer examples of nations unwinding national environmental efforts.
Internationally, the U.S. does pretty well when it comes to protecting its environment and doing its part to combat global climate change. It ranks 26 among 180 nations in the 2016 Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of the World Economic Forum and Yale University and Columbia University researchers. That’s just worse than Canada and a bit better than the Czech Republic.
The EPA sits at the forefront of that accomplishment, such as it is. The environmental laws passed under President Richard Nixon, who helped create the agency, have cleaned up the excesses of American industrialization.
Undoing Nixon’s reorganization could be accomplished by another Trump executive order, Reilly said. But “what that does not take into account is that every statute I’m aware of specifically confers authority on the administrator of EPA to carry them out,” Reilly said. Dismembering the EPA could require that Congress individually change 45 years of environmental statutes, a feat that would require an large amount of time and political capital.
Expect Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to run the agency, to preside over an EPA that (a) continues to exist, and (b) sets to work undoing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, Clean Water Rule, and reopening carbon pollution rules for new coal plants. “I would predict with great confidence that those three things will happen,” Holmstead said.
The selection of Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, has triggered protest among retired EPA staffers and people who would work for him if he’s confirmed. Environmentalists have made hay of Pruitt’s tenure in Oklahoma, where he joined more than a dozen lawsuits against the EPA and shuttered a unit focused on environmental protection.