The Trump EPA is proposing to deem the Obama EPA’s MATS rule no longer “appropriate and necessary.” This is a major win in the victory against anti-coal junk science.
The thrust of the proposal is as follows:
- EPA will no longer consider the alleged co-benefits of PM2.5 in the cost benefit analysis for MATS.
- This reduces the estimated (really, imagined) annual benefits of regulating mercury from coal plants to around $6 million per year vs. annual costs of about $10 billion. Since the imagined benefits are so few and the costs are so great, it is not “appropriate and necessary” to regulating stack emissions of mercury.
- The practical effect of the rule is little now but possibly significant in the future. Many utilities have already upgraded or shuttered plants in response to the Obama MATS rule. So the EPA’s proposal would provided no relief there. But where plants have not yet been upgraded and for future plants, the mercury emissions limits would not apply.