Trump environmental rollbacks would boost pollution and endanger lives, former EPA heads say

WASHINGTON (AP) — Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders sounded an alarm Friday, saying rollbacks proposed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency's dual mission to protect the environment and human health.

Zeldin said Wednesday he plans to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin's announcement "the most disastrous day in EPA history.''

The warning by McCarthy, who served under two Democratic administrations, was echoed by two former EPA heads who served under Republican presidents.

Zeldin's comprehensive plan to undo decades-old regulations was nothing short of a “catastrophe” and “represents the abandonment of a long history” of EPA actions to protect the environment, said William K. Reilly, who led the agency under President George H.W. Bush and played a key role in amending the Clean Air Act in 1990.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives — ours, our children, our grandchildren," added Christine Todd Whitman, who led EPA under President George W. Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about.''

Whitman was referring to one of the major actions Zeldin announced: to reconsider a scientific finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The agency’s 2009 finding has been the legal underpinning for most U.S. action against climate change, including regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources.

Environmentalists and climate scientists call the endangerment finding a bedrock of U.S. law and say any attempt to undo it will have little chance of success.

Whitman and the other former agency heads said they were stunned that the Trump administration would even try to undo the finding and a host of other longtime agency rules. If approved, the rule changes could cause “severe harms” to the environment, public health and the economy, they said.

“This EPA administrator now seems to be doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry more than complying with the mission of the EPA,'' said McCarthy, who led the agency under President Barack Obama and was a top climate adviser to President Joe Biden.

McCarthy and the other two retired leaders emphasized that environmental protection and economic prosperity are not mutually exclusive, saying strong regulations have enabled both a cleaner environment and a growing economy since the agency's founding 55 years ago.

EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said President Donald Trump “advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country” in his first term “and will continue to do so this term.”

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, rolled back more than 100 environmental laws in his first term as president. He campaigned on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” and vowed to ease regulations on fossil fuel companies. In his current term, he has frozen funds for climate programs and other environmental spending, fired scientists working for the National Weather Service and cut federal support for renewable energy.

Reilly said he feared that Zeldin and Trump, influenced by billionaire Elon Musk and his government-cutting agency, would return to a pre-EPA era when industry was free to pollute virtually at will, filling the air in many cities with dangerous smog and rivers with industrial waste.

"I wonder if the malefactors are going to give us more burning rivers,'' Reilly said. The comment was a reference to an infamous 1969 incident in which Cleveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire, spurring passage of the federal Clean Water Act and creation of the EPA a year later during the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon.

The former EPA administrators published an op-ed in the New York Times last month warning of likely environmental harm as the Trump administration imposes funding freezes, cuts spending and fires more than a thousand employees. In a statement Friday, they said the plan to undo environmental rules “sets the country on a course that will cause irreparable harm to Americans, businesses and environmental protection efforts nationwide.”

Regulations are hard to make — intentionally so, McCarthy said. “They're difficult. They take a lot of effort, which is why I think most of us are scratching our heads as to why we'd really want to keep rethinking what has fundamentally been working.”

Zeldin, in announcing the rule changes, said, Trump officials “are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.''

Among the changes are plans to rewrite a rule restricting air pollution from fossil-fuel fired power plants and a separate measure restricting emissions from cars and trucks. Zeldin and the Republican president incorrectly label the car rule as an electric vehicle “mandate.″

Biden’s Democratic administration had said the power plant rules would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting the reliable, long-term supply of electricity that America needs. Biden, who made fighting climate change a top priority of his presidency, pledged that half of all new cars and trucks sold in the U.S. will be zero-emission by 2030.

The EPA also will take aim at rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins, soot pollution and a “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that burden downwind areas with smog. Zeldin also targeted a clean water law that provides federal protections for rivers, streams and wetlands.

If approved after a lengthy process that includes public comment, the set of actions will eliminate trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and “hidden taxes,” Zeldin said, lowering the cost of living for American families and reducing prices for such essentials such as buying a car, heating your home and operating a business.

Environmentalists have vowed to fight the changes, which one group said would result in “the greatest increase in pollution in decades″ in the U.S.