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Former President Donald Trump’s environmental program suffered two significant losses in court this week as federal judges overturned rules that would have made regulating pollution more difficult.
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a rule passed in the dying days of the Trump administration that would have restricted the use of so-called “secret science,” a term used by the Conservatives to refer to data kept confidential due to patient confidentiality issues, in the regulation of pollutants by the Environmental Protection Agency.
And on Friday, a three-judge panel from the Washington, DC circuit court struck down rules that relaxed the EPA’s implementation of ozone standards under the Clean Air Act, as the panel found that the policy of the Trump era “violated[s] the unambiguous wording of the law ”and“ is based on an unreasonable interpretation of the law ”.
The first case depended on the timing of the rule change – it was set up on January 6 under former EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, himself a former coal lobbyist. Wheeler argued that the rule would increase transparency by ensuring that public health policy is based on data that can be reviewed by all.
But critics of the rule said it would limit the power of organizations like the EPA to protect public health, as much of the agency’s science relies on work that includes confidential patient data that cannot be made public legally.
For example, a landmark 1993 Harvard study, which found direct links between exposure to pollutants and death rates, for years formed the basis of the EPA’s fine particulate matter regulation. But because that study used anonymized health data, the Trump rule would have prevented it, and any similar study, from being used to create regulations.
Obama-appointed Montana District Judge Brian Morris on Wednesday sided with critics of the rule, saying the Trump administration’s decision to pass the rule two weeks before Trump’s departure was “Capricious”.
He ordered that the rule’s implementation be postponed until February 5 so that President Joe Biden’s administration can determine whether or not to apply the rule.
In Friday’s case, three judges from the United States Court of Appeals for Washington, DC – Justices Harry Edwards, David Tatel and Gregory Katsas, appointed by former Presidents Carter, Clinton and Trump respectively – concluded that parts of the rules relaxing the ozone regulation were illegal.
The rules, passed in 2015 and 2018, allowed polluters and officials to comply with ozone regulations under the Federal Air Quality Act. A key rule change has given polluters leeway in producing compounds that serve as precursors to ozone, which can be toxic. This rule allowed polluters to exchange the emission of a given ozone precursor with another known ozone precursor. Two other rules allowed states to comply with ozone requirements, and a fourth gave areas that did not meet ozone mitigation thresholds coverage against consequences if they were shown to have been affected. a plan to achieve those goals.
Environmental groups that questioned each of these provisions, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, have called the changes “flaws.”
Biden pledged to reverse Trump’s environmental policy
The Trump administration has canceled nearly 100 environmental protections in just four years. During the election campaign, Biden promised to reverse many of these actions and spent part of his early days in office doing so, using executive orders.
As Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported:
On Wednesday, Biden signed a package of executive actions meant to start making that plan a reality. In these, he ordered his administration to take a “whole-of-government approach” to tackling climate change, which includes – among other initiatives – ordering federal agencies to purchase pollution-free electricity, as well as zero-emission vehicles, and ordering the US Department of the Interior to suspend new oil and gas leases on public land or at sea.
The new orders come in addition to actions by Biden’s first-day executive to join the Paris climate deal and order his agencies to reverse a number of former President Trump’s actions that cut back environmental regulations and emissions standards.
Biden signaled that climate policy would also be a centerpiece of his economic agenda.
“Biden’s economic agenda is his climate agenda; its climate agenda is its economic agenda, ”Sam Ricketts – co-founder of climate policy group Evergreen, and senior member of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, told Nilsen.
In the short term, that means finding ways to create new jobs, according to the president. And that emphasis was highlighted in one of the decrees he signed on Wednesday, which, among other initiatives, ordered his administration to study ways to convert fossil fuel poles into renewable energy-centric communities. .
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