If the regulatory agenda announced this week by President Trump are carried out, the Clean Air Act so strongly fought by Scott Pruitt when he was Oklahoma Attorney General will be history in ten years. In short, the plan is on the chopping block.
“We’re lifting restrictions on American energy, and we’ve ended the war on coal,” said the President. “We have clean coal, beautiful, clean coal, another source of energy.”
Now led by Pruitt, the EPA announced that 54 deregulatory actions were taken in 2017.
“EPA’s plan balances its statutory requirements to issue regulations and its commitment to providing regulatory certainty through improvements to existing regulations that were flawed, outdated, ineffective or unnecessarily burdensome,” said Pruitt in a statement.
While the EPA is about a month behind its plan to decide whether to replace the Clean Power Plan, it’s moving ahead to repeal Obama administration climate rule for power plants, another rule fought by Pruitt in his previous days as Attorney General. The agency hopes to have a final rule ready in the fall of next year.
Instead of a systemwide approach used by the Obama administration, the new power plant rule will consider the best system of emissions reductions as applying only to individual stationary sources.
The administration agenda states that the repeal of the Clean Power Plan would avoid $33 billion in compliance costs. But the agenda indicated it is still reviewing the regulations for new and modified power plants and there is no clear timeline when the review might take place.