"Under orders from President Biden, EPA has taken its first overt step to revisit one of the Trump administration’s most bitterly contested air quality rollbacks.
While agency officials are not discussing the contents of a proposed rule sent yesterday to the White House budget office for a routine review, it is expected to restore the legal basis for landmark limits on emissions of mercury and other hazardous pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
Last year, the Trump administration scrapped the determination that it was “appropriate and necessary” to regulate those emissions, arguing that the underlying cost-benefit analysis was seriously flawed. While the administration’s decision had no immediate practical impact, it was opposed with particular intensity by environmental and public health groups that feared it would open the door to revoking the actual emissions limits for a class of high-polluting facilities.
Among the foes was Joe Goffman, who is now acting head of EPA’s air office. In a 2019 critique, written while he was still running Harvard University’s energy and environmental law program, Goffman accused the Trump administration of relying on a “blinkered and torturous legal interpretation” of the Clean Air Act to justify its move. In a January executive order issued on his first day in office, Biden instructed EPA to relook at the rollback and come up with a proposal by this month."
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