Trump challenge to mercury curbs a boost for coal plants

Bloomberg

The Trump administration is preparing to attack the legal basis of requirements to capture mercury and other heavy metal pollution from power plants, setting the stage for a court to potentially toss out the mandates altogether.
The move will come in the form of a final Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule concluding those mercury pollution controls are too costly to justify and no longer “appropriate and necessary,” said two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named before a formal announcement.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler will argue the new rule is based on an “honest accounting” of the direct costs and benefits of controlling mercury pollution, after the Supreme Court ruled five years ago that the agency had given them short shrift, according to drafted remarks obtained by Bloomberg.
The new rule “corrects the flaws in the previous finding, while still maintaining the agency’s mercury emissions protections,” Wheeler says in those drafted remarks. “Under this action, no more mercury will be emitted into the air than before.”
Although the rule maintains Obama administration limits on mercury and other toxic air pollutants, the EPA’s finding still will hand legal ammunition to critics seeking to undo them. That could include Bob Murray, a coal executive and benefactor of President Donald Trump who has already spent years fighting the mandates in court.
The EPA’s rule will come against the wishes of power utilities that have already spent some $18 billion complying with the requirements and have argued against the change.
“The rule will leave the standards themselves intact, but this move is designed to tee up a lawsuit by opponents to return to court to urge that the entire standards be scrapped,” said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate program. “This is an especially gratuitous and cynical rollback, since all power plants in the nation are currently complying with the standards and most utility companies” have opposed repealing the “appropriate and necessary” finding.
The agency is set to assert the mandates cost far more than the potential benefits from paring emissions of mercury, a metal that is converted in soil and water into a neurotoxin that can lower IQ, cause motor function deficits, damage the nervous system and lead to more heart attacks.
According to new analysis from the Trump administration EPA, the costs of complying with the rule are projected at $9.6 billion annually, while direct monetised benefits are estimated to be up to $6 million each year.

That’s a big shift from the analysis advanced by the Obama administration, which took a more expansive view of how the mercury pollution controls would benefit society and justified them by relying heavily on side reductions in airborne particle pollution tied to asthma attacks.
“Under the Obama-era approach, the cost-benefit scales are set so that any regulation, regardless of costs, could always be justified,” Wheeler says in the drafted remarks. “We believe this approach is not only dishonest but also counter to the Clean Air Act.”
The EPA said in an emailed statement it would make the final mercury rule publicly available once an interagency review is complete and it is signed by Wheeler. The agency said it will also release “supporting analysis and a document that responds to comments received during the comment period.”
Coal-fired power plants are the largest US source of mercury, and the 2012 pollution-control requirements prompted a wave of closures of the facilities. Coal miners have pushed the Trump administration to reverse the standards, calling them regulatory overreach by the Obama administration and arguing they unfairly discouraged power companies from burning the fossil fuel to generate electricity.
But critics say removing the legal foundation of the requirements creates uncertainty for public utilities that have satisfied the rule since at least 2016.
“This rule will cause uncertainty because there will be litigation over this incessant pendulum swing that makes it harder for businesses to comply in the future,” said Thomas Lorenzen, a partner in Crowell & Moring LLP’s Washington office.
The final mercury rule will come as the Trump administration races against the clock to lock in other pieces of the president’s first-term agenda — and help immunize the measures against easier congressional reversal next year. In recent weeks, the EPA also has finalized a rule easing fuel-economy standards and opted to maintain existing air quality limits for soot, despite public health advocates’ arguments both requirements are too lax.