Whitehouse Slams Latest in Long String of Trump EPA Giveaways to Polluters

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today issued the following statement after the EPA scrapped rules that limit emissions from power plants:

"The fossil fuel-captured EPA's decision to end its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants is a tragic and expensive mistake.

"By EPA's own analysis, the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards would have achieved up to $370 billion in net benefits over two decades, or about $20 billion a year in prevented climate disasters and health care costs.

"In refusing to address this national crisis, EPA is shifting the costs of climate change onto every family in America. Greenhouse gas-driven climate change is driving more frequent and intense hurricanes, flooding, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires. These disasters cost lives. They also cost billions of dollars in damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure; ballooning property insurance premiums, tanking home values, increased health care costs, agricultural losses, and long-term destabilization of the national economy. But the Trump EPA refuses to measure these costs and is only interested in tabulating, and inflating, the alleged costs to industry.

"Ironically, this decision will come back to bite the very industry it is intended to benefit. Now that the federal government has bowed out of climate regulation, the fossil fuel industry will face increased, and unpredictable, regulation and litigation at the state and local level. Aware of these legal risks, the American Petroleum Institute warned EPA last fall against ending greenhouse gas regulation for power plants. EPA would have done well to heed that warning."