For a man who swears to be laser-focused on ridding the world of regulatory red tape, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt sure has a funny way of showing it.
Indeed, Mr. Pruitt appears to be something of a red tape-generating savant.
On Monday, our organizationrespondedto a请求的信息from the EPA about regulating carbon emissions from power plants. Which might sound familiar, because we’vealready done that. In fact, we andseveral million othershave already done thatmultipletimesover. What’s more, the agencyitselfhas already gone down this road, from thinking about it, to issuing and responding to comments about it, to—you guessed it—evenpublishing a ruleon this very topic just a few years ago.
Yet here we are again, answering questions the agency already knows the answer to, responding to challenges the agency has already resolved.
Surely there are better uses of taxpayer dollars and government time.
Surely, that is, except according to Scott Pruitt. That’s because although the EPA is statutorily required to act on climate, the man who made a career out of serving as an eager and willing mouthpiece for oil and gas corporations would really rather not. So what’s he do instead? Wield the rulemaking process as a red tape machine, churning out bright red bows for the fossil fuel industry while tangling up the legs of forward progress for all the rest.
No, no, you’re right—we’ve definitely done this before
Here’s the thing: the scientific and legal backing for the EPA’s regulation of carbon emissions from power plants is remarkably robust, andthe record to support it lengthy:
- In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled inMassachusetts v. EPAthat the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
- In 2009, the EPA completed itsEndangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings, which confirmed the agency’s obligation to act on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
- In 2015, the EPA issued a final version of those required standards in the form of theClean Power Plan, the product of a robust and years long rulemaking process.
But then came 2017, and Scott Pruitt appointed as EPA administrator. Though the facts haven’t changed, forward progress has been spinning its wheels ever since.
Unreasonably narrow, inappropriately weak
The Trump Administration cast a long shadow over the Clean Power Plan with itsExecutive Order on Energy Independencein March 2017, but the rule’s proposed repeal wasn’t actually issueduntil last October. The agency isstill taking comment在这个提议,除了mockery of the value of human health and the environment, attempts to reinterpret the Clean Air Act as well as how the power system works in order to avoid the need for meaningful regulatory action.
At the same time, because the agency is statutorily required to act, the EPA followed up withan advance notice of proposed rulemaking(ANPR) in December 2017 to simplyconsiderhow it might go about regulating greenhouse gas emissions in line with this new interpretation. The result was a remarkably transparent attempt to waste time, ignore facts, and abdicate the agency’s foremost responsibility of protecting human health and the environment.
- The ANPR gets off to a rocky start by prejudging the outcome of the ongoing—and ostensibly unbiased and objective—proposed repeal’s rulemaking process, limiting the agency’s interest in information to only that which conforms with an incredibly narrow interpretation of compliance.
- The ANPR repeatedly solicits comment suggesting an overarching motivation that is not rooted in limiting power sector carbon emissions, but rather in finding ways to limit the agency’s own role and responsibilities on this front—up to and includingwhetherthe EPA should set limits at all.
- The ANPR actively ignores the existence of ourever-improving understanding of the costs of climate impacts, as well as the ever-improving fundamentals of clean energy resources. Instead of looking for ways to weaken the Clean Power Plan, the EPA should—must—be doing everything it can tostrengthenit, in turn delivering significant near and long-term health benefits to communities around the country while at the same time contributing to global efforts to limit climate change.
Ultimately, the ANPR does little more than crystallizejust how muchScott Pruitt does not care about his charge as EPA Administrator, instead advancingcynical charadesat the expense of thehealth and well-beingof Americans, now and in the future.
Why we still fight
And yet, we stillsubmitted commentson Monday.
Alongside250,000others.
We did this despite knowing that the EPA issued its request for comment with the sole purpose of delaying a statutory requirement to act. We did this despite recognizing that the EPA has shown no signs that it will truly consider our response.
We did this by the hundreds of thousands because respect for our institutions demands nothing less.
Scott Pruitt has made abundantly clear he holds no respect for the mission of the agency he has been appointed to direct, but the thing is, the rest of us still do. So when the agency asks us to write, we write. And when the time comes that the courts rule on the agency’s need to act, all of our many words will be there, waiting and ready to fight the good fight.