EPA goes dark by Brea Willis

The Environmental Protection Agency was created to protect Americans from the consequences of pollution. In Donald Trump’s America, it increasingly looks like an agency being asked to protect pollution from Americans.

The latest move is breathtaking even by the standards of this administration. The EPA has repealed most of the Biden-era greenhouse-gas requirements for coal- and gas-fired power plants and proposed removing the remaining federal standards governing carbon emissions from the power sector. The administration says the rollback will save more than $300 billion and unleash American energy. Critics point to the obvious alternative accounting: dirtier air, greater carbon emissions and higher long-term costs imposed not on power companies, but on everyone else.

This is more than another regulatory dispute. It is a philosophical declaration. The Trump administration is effectively arguing that because American power-plant emissions are only one part of a global problem, Washington should do less about them. That logic could be applied to almost anything. One factory is only one factory. One oil field is only one oil field. One country is only one country. Climate change, conveniently, becomes everybody else's responsibility.

That is precisely how collective problems become permanent ones. There is something particularly revealing about the language of “energy abundance”. Abundance of what? Coal and gas, certainly. But energy abundance without environmental accounting is rather like celebrating cheap cigarettes because the tobacco industry has stopped paying for the hospital.

The administration presents regulation as an enemy of prosperity, as though environmental standards were an eccentric luxury invented by bureaucrats who dislike electricity. Yet the economic calculation is never so simple. A power plant may save money by avoiding emissions controls. The costs do not disappear. They migrate into polluted communities, damaged ecosystems, health systems, insurance bills, agricultural losses and the increasingly expensive business of adapting to a hotter and more unstable climate.

That is the great trick of deregulation: call something a saving when the bill has merely been handed to somebody else. The EPA's own policy reversal is especially striking because greenhouse gases do not become less consequential simply because an American regulator changes its paperwork. Carbon dioxide does not read the Federal Register. The atmosphere does not recognise national borders. Physics is famously indifferent to presidential slogans.

And America is hardly a spectator. Power plants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. climate pollution, making the sector too large to dismiss as a rounding error.

There is also a political danger in turning environmental protection into an ideological battlefield. Climate policy should certainly be debated: about costs, technology, reliability, employment and the pace of transition. But abolishing standards is not the same as winning that debate. It simply removes one of the referees.

Trump's EPA is therefore doing something more consequential than helping coal and gas. It is redefining what government is for.

An environmental agency that regards pollution controls as an economic burden rather than a public responsibility eventually ceases to be an environmental agency in everything but name.

The darkest irony is that the administration calls this freedom. It is freedom for the smokestack, perhaps. For everyone breathing beneath it, the future looks rather less liberating.