It hurt to watch Donald Trump render the granite and marble halls of America into sharp-edged rubble. He tore into the U.S.Postal Service, one of the few bright lights during our year of sequestration. Now, we are finding that everywhere we look, he had gleefully sent out his minions of destruction. But finally, it appears that America is turning a corner on the nightmare that was the Donald Trump reign of the odious. The news is good.
A panel of federal appeals judges in the nation’s capitol took a stand against one of the ex-president’s worst polluting Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rules. That rule would have actually kept the EPA from setting greenhouse gas limits on a variety of the worse polluting sectors.
President Joe Biden’s administration requested the court vacate the rule. And a number of public health and environmental organization and several states brought a lawsuit and sued the EPA over that regulation.
The three-judge panel of Judith Rogers, David Sentelle, and Robert Wilkins, who served under Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Obama agreed.
The court order was a decided win for environmental groups. Environmental Defense Fund Senior Attorney Rosalie Winn released a statement that read:
‘The Trump Administration tried to tie EPA’s hands by setting an arbitrary threshold for when polluters could be regulated. Today’s court decision leaves the Biden administration free to set standards for climate pollution based on solid science and law.’
Just as his term was ending, Trump implemented a regulation that narrowed the EPA’s limits to power plants. Then, it exempted the oil, gas, steel, and manufacturing industries. His rule ludicrously claimed that only the industries that polluted over three percent of the entire nation’s greenhouse gas emissions were:
‘[C]onsidered to contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.’
Not so coincidentally, the EPA showed that oil and gas production has created between 2.5 and 3.0 percent of all of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Basically, that arbitrary regulation would have given some of the worse polluters a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The EPA spokesperson indicated that it:
‘[W]ill follow the science and law in accordance with the Biden-Harris Administration’s executive orders and other directives in reviewing all of the agency’s actions issued under the previous Administration to ensure that they protect public health and the environment.’
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
