To President Donald Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency should be a job creator, not a job killer.
But that idea was nowhere in the mind of President Richard Nixon, who asked Congress to create the EPA.
“Clean air, clean water, open spaces — these should once again be the birthright of every American,” he said in his 1970 State of the Union address.
Today, there’s a different aspiration governing the EPA. It’s to bring back coal as the leading energy resource in the country. The agency’s name could be changed to CPA for Coal Protection Agency.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who repeatedly sued the agency when he was attorney general in Oklahoma, signed a measure Tuesday seeking to repeal the Clean Power Plan. The action follows an executive order by the president setting a “national policy in favor of energy independence, economic growth, and the rule of law,” the EPA said in a news release.
Of course, that has nothing to do with the agency’s former mission of protecting the environment. Its purpose now is to clear obstacles from Trump’s campaign promise to bring back coal jobs. To that end, it’s actually intervening in the energy marketplace to pick winners and losers — an approach usually derided by conservatives.
The marketplace has decided that coal’s hey-day is over. Trump and his political supporters blame former President Barack Obama for killing the coal industry, but coal jobs were fast vanishing before Obama took office. The trend continued in recent years because of a superior competitor — cheaper, cleaner and more abundant natural gas. From 2008 to 2016, 17 percent of U.S. coal-energy capacity retired, and that trend will continue as companies such as Duke Energy close inefficient coal plants or convert them to natural gas, and further add renewable resources to their portfolios.
Coal isn’t only more expensive than natural gas, it leaves high residual costs. Duke has proposed an average 13.6 percent rate hike, about half of which is related to coal-ash storage.
“A typical residential family actually generates more than 150 pounds of coal ash every year from the electricity that they consume,” Duke spokesman Jeff Brooks said in August. Wow. How much more do we want?
A coal-ash spill into the Dan River in 2014 made national headlines, and seepage from storage basins continues to be a concern for nearby residents. And, obviously, burning coal adds heavily to air pollution, posing health risks and contributing to greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, according to climate scientists.
The Trump administration, however, rejects this science. The president has called climate change “a Chinese hoax.” Pruitt discounts a human impact on climate. His recently nominated deputy, Andrew Wheeler, was a top aide to Sen. James Inhofe, who once carried a snowball into the Senate chamber to “prove” the Earth isn’t warming. More recently, Wheeler has worked for Murray Energy, a coal company.
These are the people now entrusted with environmental protection. Yet, they admit that’s not their priority.
But even Robert Murray, head of Murray Energy, warned Trump about his coal jobs promise. “I suggested that he temper his expectations. Those are my exact words,” Murray told The Guardian in March. “He can’t bring them back.”
All Trump can do, then, is give the green light for coal plants to emit more pollutants into the air for as long as they’re still in operation, with disregard for environmental consequences or the health effects on people with asthma or other medical conditions.
Many states won’t accept that and plan to maintain their own clean-air regulations. The N.C. legislature, unfortunately, won’t allow that here. But environmental groups, joined by progressive states, can ask the courts to make the EPA do the job President Nixon intended and which it has done well — until now.
