Clean Air Act

Well, uh, they're, they're, they're interrelated.

I, uh, I did a study of the, uh, f- the, the first, uh, uh, Clean Air Act, and, uh, and, uh, that is a real concern.

There's probably more people that are stressed on their health by air pollution.

And I don't know which city you're in right now, but

The second, which still requires approval, would rescind greenhouse gas emissions requirements for all power plants and prevent future administrations from implementing similar regulations.

The EPA justified the rollback based on, quote, the best reading of the Clean Air Act, end quote, saying that the law did not give it the authority to regulate power plant emissions based on climate change concerns.

environmentalists criticized the deregulation, saying the effects of unregulated coal and natural gas would be dangerous to public health and the environment.

Quote, the repeal is going to mean more pollution, more extreme weather, higher electricity bills, because we're going to continue to rely on fossil fuels, end quote.

The federal government's decision-making should reflect the costs of its choices.

In Blaze Media, Zach Laidlaw said the repeal counters climate hysteria over carbon emissions.

The Clean Air Act has been around since the 1970s.

The original version specifically targeted vehicle emissions, namely carbon monoxide, which is harmful to humans in concentrated quantities.

And today, London still has air quality problems, but they're orders of magnitude smaller.

In the US, the most dangerous pollutants have fallen by more than 70% since the Clean Air Act.

And that's the pattern she keeps coming back to.

It's not that the problem was solved forever.

'Cause states can typically, like, um, pass more stringent regulations than, than federal law, um, requires, but they shouldn't be able to pass weaker ones.

So the EPA is trying to get away with, um, reducing that sort of, like, federal standard by, um, taking away the public participation requirements under the Clean Air Act for facilities like AI data centers, so quote unquote, "minor sources of pollution." We can obviously argue whether or not they're actually minor, but, you know, in, in comparison to the power plants, and we can also talk about that, 'cause these are, those are, like, you know, major source emitters.

And the EPA is also eliminating rules setting emissions limits from coal and gas-fired power plants, um, which I didn't even get to in the piece, 'cause that came out after the piece had already been filed.

Yeah.

They're taking away, one of the things that's interesting in this, like, kind of, like, obscure bureaucratic area, um, is taking away the, um, the dollar benefit of saving lives from reducing air pollution in the calculations that they do.

Exactly.

Because what we see with the Clean Air Act is that the, the value of these tightened regulations on polluters is so profound for society.

Billions of dollars in, like, estimated, like, you know, avoided hospital stays, premature deaths.

At the core of this policy shift is Trump's deliberate neutralization of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Under his designated EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, the agency has moved to relinquish its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants under the Clean Air Act.

This decision effectively eliminates any limit on emissions from coal and gas facilities, constraining the ability of future leaders to implement national carbon limits.

EPA calculations indicate that Donald Trump's decision to reverse carbon pollution standards for power plants will add 123 million metric tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere over the next decade alone.

And if you look at the polling in California, we did polling, 88% of Democrats supported him waiving environmental regulations, waiving CEQA to allow for this kind of work followed with prescribed fire to happen.

It is broadly popular now for people to talk about having exemptions for the Clean Air Act and other laws to make sure we can get good fire on the ground.

So the conversation has been shifting a lot.

This is a rare case where I actually think instead of a politician reacting to the will of the electorate, but they've actually shaped it by leaning into it and showing that this can work.

There are few instances where both political parties agree on, well, anything these days.

But we are starting to see some glimmers of alignment when it comes to fire prevention and management.

Congress is currently considering a bill that would tweak the Clean Air Act to allow for more prescribed fires.

The Fix Our Forest Act has received bipartisan support and already passed the House.

But at the same time, they're gutting the Clean Water Act.

They're gutting the Clean Air Act.

There's only one reason you'd do that, right? One, you don't like regs.

I get it.

Whatever.

It doesn't matter to me.

But you're going to kill the Clean Water Act while we have data centers dumping poisoned water into drinking water sources, right? And we're going to get rid of the Clean Air Act while Elon Musk is putting tons of methane-burning backup generators places.

Until this country's policy is aligned with what AI needs in a very meaningful way, not we got rid of all the renewables because we're going all in on coal.

He doesn't get enough credit, actually, for being a pretty smart, market-focused environmentalist.

He was also the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, like did some really cool stuff.

Anyways, quietly killed it.

And the Denver Water Board was completely replaced.

So I got to tell you, the news today, very interesting.

The right wing think tanks are all tingly in the panties over the Trump administration's gutting of the Clean Air Act.

And I know anything that Biden did is bad.

Anything that Trump does is good.