The Trump administration is considering whether to repeal or revise two major Obama administration regulations limiting air pollution from large sources, reports The Hill.
Justice Department attorneys asked the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit late Tuesday to delay scheduled oral arguments in two separate cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules.
The most major action concerns the landmark 2012 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, one of the most costly Obama administration rules that has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of coal-fired power plants.
The EPA is reviewing whether it supports a 2016 regulation that the Obama administration wrote to fix a problem that the Supreme Court found when it ruled in 2015 that the EPA did not follow the law in writing the mercury rule.
Scott Pruitt, now the EPA’s administrator, sued to stop the rule when he was attorney general of Oklahoma, labeling it part of the Obama administration’s “war on coal.”
The Obama administration had predicted that the rule would cost $9.6 billion, produce between $37 billion and $90 billion in benefits and prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma cases annually. Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav}
