Trump rolls back environmental regulations while lockdowns unwittingly reduce air pollution
City skylines have already cleared amid reduced travel, but positive environmental effects won’t last with these new policies in place.
While the coronavirus cripples the United States, with almost 52,000 deaths and 906,000 reported cases, President Donald Trump has asserted several policies in the past few weeks that could increase the threat of climate change.
Loosening ‘clean car’ standards
The administration released a new rule on March 31 that would rollback an Obama-era climate change policy. The old rule encouraged automakers to increase production of electric and fuel-efficient vehicles; it would’ve improved fuel efficiency by about 5% every year.
Trump’s new rule will lower that improvement standard from 5% per year to 1.5% per year until 2026, enabling more cars to emit more greenhouse gases. The administration said that the looser mileage standards will allow automakers to produce vehicles that are less expensive, helping drivers afford upgraded cars with better safety features; environmental experts and some carmakers opposed the move, which would result in a sharp increase in air pollution.
Allowing dirty air to increase COVID-19 deaths
Following in Trump’s footsteps, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency Andrew R. Wheeler announced that the agency will not impose stricter regulations on industrial soot emissions. The declined action had suggested tightening regulations on the toxic particulate P.M. 2.5, but the E.P.A. decided that the current standards protect public health enough.
Meanwhile, recent reports showed that cities with higher traces of P.M. 2.5 in the air had higher death rates from COVID-19.
Making room for more mercury emissions
On April 16, the Trump administration loosened regulations on coal-fired power plants that release mercury; the toxic metal can have negative health effects on pregnant women and infants, including brain damage and development issues.
The original Obama-era policy forced power plants to cut their mercury emissions — citing that consumers’ savings on health care outweighed the compliance cost for power plant companies — in addition to other harmful substances emitted from smokestacks. Trump’s new rule recalculated that cost to only account for mercury, ultimately weakening mercury restrictions, as noticed by environmental experts who criticized the change.
Meanwhile, reduced travel has reduced air pollution
All these environmental moves came while the White House deals with the global outbreak — and stay-at-home policies to curb the virus’ spread have had some inadvertent, positive environmental impacts.
10 major cities around the world — including New York and Los Angeles — have seen significant air quality improvement since the start of the pandemic, according to research from IQAir, a global air quality information company.
New Delhi, India, one of the highest-polluted cities in the world, has seen a 60% drop in PM 2.5 since 2019. 85 cities in India saw some improvement in air pollution within the first week of the country’s lockdown, according to India’s Central Pollution Control Board.
But this lesson may be lost on dire economic aid
With decreased demand for travel, oil prices dropped below zero for the first time in history last Monday, going from $18 to negative-$38 a barrel within hours. The pandemic forced American petroleum companies to shut down rigs and remove fracking.
Economic safeguards will have to be put in place to get industries like oil back on their feet, possibly forgoing environmental policies to do so. As the pandemic persists, the Trump administration has already made policies that aim to assist companies, despite possible environmental and health impacts.
Although unintentional, the pandemic has shown that action can be taken to lessen the impacts of pollution, depending on how countries and companies bounce back. And it might just alter viewpoints of environmental policies.
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