EPA Withdraws Air Pollution Policy

This is from the Wall Street Journal, not a beacon of progressive thought. That said, the numbers are growing of those of us who are recognizing that we will not survive if we continue to poison rather than protect our Earth Mother. Truly, this madness must be stopped. — Molly

Agency reverses decades-old emissions policy that environmentalists and congressional critics called one of its bedrock regulations

By Timothy Puko

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is withdrawing a decades-old air policy aimed at reining in some of the largest sources of hazardous pollutants like mercury and lead.

The Environmental Protection Agency said late Thursday it is getting rid of requirements that it forever keep sites classified as “major sources” of hazardous air pollution once they meet that classification. This “once-in always-in” policy punished industry by keeping factories and other sites under heavy regulation even if they made improvements that would prevent them from being major sources of pollution, according to the EPA and lawmakers who had requested the move.

Environmentalists and congressional critics decried the change, saying it is one of the EPA’s bedrock environmental regulations that keeps polluters from trimming back to just below the major-source classification cutoff to avoid requirements that could further lower their emissions.

President Donald Trump has made a rollback of environmental regulations one of his signature issues, carrying out a main campaign promise by withdrawing or rewriting rules designed to fight climate change, coal-ash pollution and coastal flooding, among many others. It is part of a broad attempt to make oil companies, power plants and manufacturers, among several different industries, more competitive by lowering their costs.

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