Trump EPA shenanigans will be a public health and environmental disaster

An even more right-wing SCOTUS will make this all that much harder to try to fix.

The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic has ush­ered in a wave of wor­ri­some and need­less reg­u­la­to­ry relax­ations that have increased pol­lu­tion across the Unit­ed States. Recent report­ing by the Asso­ci­at­ed Press and oth­er out­lets has doc­u­ment­ed more than 3,000 pan­dem­ic-based requests from pol­luters to state agen­cies and the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency for waivers of envi­ron­men­tal require­ments. Numer­ous state gov­ern­ments, with the tac­it encour­age­ment of the EPA, went along with many of those requests. All too often, those waivers — request­ed, osten­si­bly, to pro­tect Amer­i­can work­ers from expo­sure to the coro­n­avirus — were grant­ed with lit­tle or no review, notwith­stand­ing the risks the result­ing emis­sions posed to pub­lic health and the environment…

These reg­u­la­to­ry fail­ures have occurred against the back­drop of a steady decline in both fed­er­al and state envi­ron­men­tal enforce­ment. The num­bers of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists and attor­neys whose work focus­es on enforc­ing envi­ron­men­tal laws has dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years. There have also been sub­stan­tial decreas­es in the num­bers of in-per­son gov­ern­ment inspec­tions of pol­lu­tion sources, the vol­ume of enforce­ment actions pur­sued, the num­ber of envi­ron­men­tal crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions, and the amount of mon­ey that pol­luters have been com­pelled to spend on pol­lu­tion con­trol as a direct result of enforce­ment activ­i­ties. EPA has all but aban­doned its long­stand­ing over­sight of state enforce­ment work. And the fed­er­al agency has craven­ly deferred to state enforce­ment (or nonen­force­ment) pri­or­i­ties, even though quite a few states lack the resources and/​or polit­i­cal will to effec­tive­ly enforce envi­ron­men­tal standards.

Howls of protest and a fed­er­al law­suit prompt­ed EPA to ter­mi­nate its Covid pol­i­cy as of Aug. 31. But too much dam­age has already been done. - In These Times