Donald Trump’s administration has offered fossil fuel companies an extraordinary opportunity to evade air pollution rules by simply emailing the US president to ask him to exempt them.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set up a new email address where what it calls the “regulated community” can request a presidential exemption from their requirements under the Clean Air Act, which is used to regulate dangerous toxins emitted from polluting sources.
Operators of power plants that burn coal or oil, linked to tens of thousands of deaths each year in the US via the mercury, arsenic and other carcinogens emitted through their air pollution, have until Monday to ask Trump to allow them to bypass clean air laws.
“The president will make a decision on the merits” of each request, which can be for up to two years and be renewed, according to the EPA website. Helpfully, the EPA’s site provides a template for these requests, including pointers as to how to successfully ask for an exemption.
Trump pledged as a presidential candidate to repeal environmental laws if he got $1bn in campaign donations from oil and gas companies. While he didn’t reach that figure, Trump did receive tens of millions of dollars from the industry and has said that the US needs to “drill, baby, drill” through unfettered fossil fuel expansion, rejecting the scientific consensus that burning coal, oil and gas is causing a worsening climate crisis.
As president, Trump has set about dismantling pollution rules. Dozens of rollbacks by the EPA have targeted regulations that were intended to save nearly 200,000 lives in the US by 2050, as well as prevent millions of asthma attacks, heart and respiratory problems and other public health harms.
Rewriting these rules will take time, however, meaning that Trump has turned to an obscure and rarely used corner of the Clean Air Act to suspend pollution rules in the meantime. Under the act, presidents can exempt a business from pollution requirements if the technology necessary to meet the standard is not available and that this is in the US’s national security interests.
Environmental groups said that power plants had used technology to lower pollutants for years and that the new emailed exemption was an outrageous attempt to side-step clean air laws. “These safeguards protect the health and wellbeing of our communities and there is no legitimate basis to suspend them,” said Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s beyond coal campaign.
“The EPA must abandon this ridiculous proposal now, and do its job of holding fossil fuel companies to current air pollution standards.”
The decision to set up the email by Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, was “an extreme and improper abuse of Clean Air Act authorities that only allow for exemptions from vital pollution protections in very narrow circumstances,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel for the green advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund.
after newsletter promotion
“This is a Trump EPA-led effort to evade established limits on toxic pollution that protect millions of people across the US.”
Patton’s organization on Thursday filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all submissions to the portal, including the names of all entities requesting the exemptions. The group has pledged to “go to court if necessary” to obtain the records, and to make them public.
“[T]he American public deserves to know what the Trump EPA and polluters are doing to the air they breathe,” said Patton.
Reached for comment, an EPA spokesperson said: “Section 112(i)(4) specifically states that the president may exempt any stationary source ‘if the president determines that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so’.”
