The Quad Report

In a move that will surprise many in Washington, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is going to back away from wholesale changes to the Obama administration’s Mercury and Air Toxics regulations, according to Bloomberg News in a report today. Instead, the EPA will make some regulatory definition changes that could make it harder to toughen the 2012 rules, aimed mostly at mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, in the future.

The coal mining industry – led by Robert Murray of Murray Energy Corp., a strong supporter of President Trump – has been pushing EPA to scrap the mercury rules. Murray had Trump’s ear during the 2016 presidential campaign and was a major force behind Trump’s pledge to ease environmental regulations on burning coal.

Murray Energy is the largest privately-owned coal company in the U.S., with 63 million tons of annual production in 2014. Four publicly-traded companies have surpassed Murray’s production, with Peabody Energy the largest at 190 million tons in 2014. Three of the top four have declared bankruptcy protection in 2015 and 2016.

Liberal and environmental groups following the issue had expected EPA to gut the mercury rule. The left-oriented Center for American Progress as recently as Dec. 18 predicted that acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, would soon roll back the rules. CAP said, “Wheeler has signaled that he intends to take steps to undo the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), protections that limit the amount of mercury and other toxins power plants are allowed to release into the air,” citing as a source an October Washington Post article that said Wheeler “could” move to lower the mercury standards.

It wasn’t environmental groups or progressive lobbyists who turned EPA around, according to Bloomberg. Instead, it was large coal-burning electric utilities that have complied with the MATS rules and spent billions on new pollution control equipment and are now in compliance with the mercury reductions.

Bloomberg quoted John McManus, senior VP of environmental services at Ohio-based American Electric Power, “We’ve been in compliance for a number of years now, the equipment is operating and it is effective. We really see no reason at all to roll back the requirements.” North Carolina-based Duke Energy, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned utilities, has also lobbied the EPA and the White House to back off on scrapping the MATS rules.

AEP says it has invested nearly $9 billion in retrofits at its coal-fired plants since 2000, much of it aimed at complying with the mercury rule. AEP’s mercury emissions have dropped 95% since 2001. A CAP analysis finds that in the three years since MATS went into effect in 2015, “nationwide emissions from power plants dropped by 65 percent.” Since 2011, mercury emissions have declined 81.7 percent.

According to Bloomberg, EPA is set to issue its new proposed rules today. The partial government shutdown has snared the environmental agency, but it says it has leftover funding that will keep it in business for at least this week.

— Kennedy Maize