After a utility company burns a heap of coal to fire a turbine, they’re left with tons of coal ash, a hazardous waste product chock full of heavy metals, toxic substances, and even trace amounts of radioactive elements. As such, it’s incredibly dangerous to human health, which is why the Environmental Protection Agency under Joe Biden took up a badly needed rule meant to finally regulate coal ash dumping for the first time in 2024.
Two years later, that could be going away, at least if Donald Trump gets his way. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration last week proposed a set of rollbacks that would decimate the country’s waterways.
Legally, Trump can’t just undo the Biden-era rules on a whim. Instead, his EPA has started work on a convoluted workaround, which includes state-level enforcement delays and revisions to the original regulations. Basically, the Trump admin is gunning to relax groundwater monitoring and protection standards for energy companies by allowing individual states to grant exemptions to the federal regulation of 2024.
In a statement to the AP, EPA director Lee Zeldin said the legal cajoling underscores the agency’s “commitment to restoring American energy dominance, strengthening cooperative federalism, and accommodating unique circumstances at certain [coal] facilities.”
The Biden era regulations likewise mandated corporations clean up at least 450 waste dump sites retroactively, many of which are situated on the banks of rivers (about 37 of which are directly located on the Great Lakes.) If the EPA takes up the proposed deregulations, the standards used to hold companies accountable for cleaning up their past coal ash dumping would be de facto eliminated.
“The Trump administration just took a sledgehammer to the health protections in place for toxic coal pollution,” Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice told the AP. “This is yet another handout to the coal power industry at the expense of our health, water, and wallets.”
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