Reality check: Hurdles await EPA’s deregulatory spree – E&E News by POLITICO

Source: Reality check: Hurdles await EPA’s deregulatory spree – E&E News by POLITICO

…“There was a desire for quick fixes and silver bullets, and the EPA got burned with that under Pruitt,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar and founding director of Case Western Reserve University’s environmental law center. “It almost seems like some of those lessons have been unlearned.”

….Joe Goffman, former EPA air chief under former President Joe Biden, said Zeldin and other current officials may have gleaned from the first Trump administration’s court losses that they should find new workarounds for deregulation, rather than try to operate within legal constraints.

“Withdrawing the endangerment finding may be the governing shortcut,” he said, referring to EPA’s 2009 conclusion that carbon dioxide and other planet-warming pollution endanger public health and welfare. “If you actually withdraw that, think of how these dominoes would fall.”

The endangerment finding is one of the EPA actions on the Trump administration’s chopping block.

“Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories,” said Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Jeff Clark in one of several press releases EPA issued Wednesday. “Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.”

Legal experts say the courts have consistently rejected that exact argument.

“If the goal is deregulation, then deregulate. Replacing more burdensome rules with less burdensome rules makes a lot of sense, and EPA has a lot of authority to do that. But the endangerment finding, just look at the language of the” Clean Air Act, said Adler. “The agency doesn’t have the sort of space that the administration wants with that language.”

Still, even if the courts reject the Trump administration’s rule-busting effort, EPA’s agenda could still have destructive practical effects, said Goffman.

“Even if they ultimately lose, just starting the process creates the kind of time-destroying chaos in what up until yesterday had been a robust climate policy regime,” he said in an interview Thursday. “Twenty-four hours in, the mission of sabotage is already on its way to success.”