The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week announced rollbacks of power plant emissions regulations. The move concerns Adirondack advocates who say there will be negative environmental and economic implications for the region.
During a speech Monday at the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial meeting in Houston, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the rollback of greenhouse gas emissions rules for power plants.
“We aren’t just stopping with the Biden Administration’s overreach. We are also proposing to rescind all remaining greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants. All of them.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump is no longer protecting the environment.”
Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve Managing Partner David Gibson says the announcement has far reaching and negative implications for the Adirondacks and beyond.
“EPA is failing their fundamental and legal mission and that’s very unfortunate for the entire globe because the United States is one of the world’s greatest emitters of carbon warming gases. So that’s serious for the Adirondacks but it’s serious for the entire state and the entire nation.”
Before the implementation of previous emissions regulations, the Adirondacks and Northeast had been showered with acid rain, due mostly to emissions traveling downwind from Midwestern power plants. Adirondack Council spokesman John Sheehan says with the Obama and Biden era rules in place, the region had been recovering.
“We’re seeing the recovery from acid rain happen on the ground at a time when we’re seeing the EPA reverse the very regulations that made this trend possible. So we’re very concerned that we’re going backwards in the Adirondacks.”
Sheehan adds that the current federal administration is compromising further ecosystem recovery.
“We were seeing additional recovery take place in the Park and faster recovery take place in ecosystems that have been pretty heavily damaged. To see that reversed is a real problem because the damage done by acid rain includes depleting the soil of the buffering capacity necessary to withstand future pollution. That’s a problem that will rapidly manifest if we see pollution return to the levels that they were at in the 1970s and 80s.”
Gibson agrees that if the new rule is implemented there will be serious damage to the environment and human health.
“When you allow coal burning, oil burning and gas burning plants to emit more carbon warming gases they have had historically a very, very negative effect on the economy and the ecology of the Adirondacks. The impact of particulates on human health are also very seriously affected by lifting these controls. And it’s not economic. You know, 300 coal burning plants have closed in the last 15 years. They simply are too expensive to run. So, it makes absolutely no sense what the EPA and President Trump are doing economically and environmentally.”
Advocates for the power plants say they can’t afford to operate because of the emissions rules.
In mid-August the NRECA, or National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, urged the EPA to fully repeal the 2024 rule requiring the installation of emissions reduction technology by 2032 saying it “restricts operations at existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas facilities unless they install carbon capture and sequestration technology that is not commercially available or technically feasible...”
The EPA will hold a public hearing 15 days after the new rule is published in the Federal Register and also plans a 45-day public comment period.
