Republican senators joined with Democrats Monday to press the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a controversial proposal to re-evaluate Obama-era regulations meant to reduce the amount of air pollution emitted by coal power plants.
Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., co-authored a letter with Democrats to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler warning that revisiting the Obama administration’s mercury and air toxics rule, or MATS, would harm public health.
The opposition from Collins and Tillis, who face tough re-election fights in purple states in 2020, is significant because it shows that some Republicans are willing to push back on elements of the EPA’s deregulatory agenda. Alexander is retiring.
Americans are “breathing cleaner air” and their “health is better” because of the Obama rule, which was imposed in 2011, the senators wrote.
“It makes no sense to take any action that could lead to the weakening of mercury emissions standards,” added the senators.
Also signing the letter were Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the top Democrat of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
Collins last month voted against Wheeler’s nomination to be administrator because he didn’t sufficiently combat climate change during his acting leadership of the agency.
The opposition letter comes as EPA hosted its only public hearing Monday on the proposed changes to the coal rule.
EPA’s proposal would not do much to help the coal industry, since companies have already complied with the regulations by either spending billions to upgrade their plants or shutting them down.
The Trump EPA is trying to reverse the cost-benefit analysis used to justify the regulation, while not rolling back the rules themselves, because the agency argues the Obama administration inflated the public health benefits of the rule, and underrated industry costs.
But major coal-burning utilities, such as Duke Energy, based in Tillis’ home state of North Carolina, and American Electric Power, have pushed back on re-evaluating the MATS rule.
Critics say altering the cost-benefit analysis that provided the legal justification for the mercury rule could make it more difficult for the government to rationalize environmental regulations in other cases.
