Bericht van de NRDC 1-april-2020
https://www.nrdc.org/united-states
Dear Peter
While the COVID-19 crisis worsens in the U.S and around the world, the Trump administration is quietly pushing its anti-environment agenda forward.
At this moment the Trump administration should be focused on making our country healthier. Instead, it is taking advantage of the unprecedented global pandemic to do favors for polluters, thereby putting people’s health at further risk.
This week, the Trump administration gutted clean car standards — strong pollution and fuel efficiency standards for automobiles that have reduced massive amounts of toxic air and climate pollution from the nation’s cars and trucks.
And last week, Trump’s EPA announced it is suspending pollution rules — allowing industrial facilities to stop monitoring and reporting dangerous air pollution, without penalty, during the COVID-19 crisis.
In other words, amidst a massive public health crisis, President Trump is drastically rolling back protections for our air, water, climate — and even our health. Doesn’t this administration have more important things to do right now?
The only winner from Trump’s rollback of clean car standards is the oil industry, which wants us stuck driving dirty gas guzzlers as long as possible.
Trump’s move will dramatically increase air pollution and respiratory diseases like asthma. It will also lead to an increase of at least 867 million more metric tons of carbon emissions, when our priority needs to be cracking down on this pollution to fight climate change.
Trump’s attack on clean car standards is projected to impose $190 billion in additional health costs. It will increase the cost of driving by billions of dollars as the fuel efficiency of automobiles drops. And it will result in at least 90,000 fewer American jobs in the burgeoning clean car industry.
Then there’s the EPA’s suspension of regulatory enforcement, which is nothing short of an open license to pollute. Plain and simple.
Chemical plants, oil and gas operations, power plants, steel mills, coal plants, and more, can now dump toxic chemicals in our waters and emit deadly gases and other health-harming pollution into our air, with no accountability or oversight.
NRDC is going to do all we can to block this nefarious policy, starting with petitioning the agency to, at the very least, require companies to publicly disclose when they plan to stop monitoring and reporting their pollution and emissions.
That’s important because people need accurate and timely information about pollution in their community in order to protect themselves — especially in the midst of a pandemic that puts those with heart and lung disease at higher risk. Monitoring and reporting also serve a critically important deterrent function. Facilities are more likely to stay within their pollution limits if they know someone is watching.
There is no “right time” to impose higher health and economics costs on the people in America — and to do so now, amid a worldwide crisis, is unconscionable.
These moves come amid a recent growing onslaught of attacks on strong science and environmental protections by Trump and his EPA.
Last month, the Trump administration announced its “censoring science” scheme that would greatly restrict the EPA’s use of the best available science when setting environmental and public health protections.
And earlier this year, Trump’s EPA moved forward with a plan to roll
back the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — which protects
people against pollution in their communities.
