EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History
epa.gov
epa.gov
I am not sure what's the point of EPA at all, if it's goals now are create jobs etc.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/climate/epa-zeldin-rollba...
For your reading enjoyment: The Toxic Wave That Swallowed a Tennessee Town, https://oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/the-toxic-wave-that-swallo...
this is like DEA press-release about opening up pop-up fentanyl shops in every elementary school
"This is what the American people want. This is the choice of the people. It's democracy in action and this is what the American people voted for, adults with eyes wide open."
Wasn't one of the DOGE employee working on vote bulletin validation and tampering in the past?
Even if Trump won the presidency, without gerrymandering there's at least a chance that congress would stand up to him.
Yeah that’s a specimen.
There are much better functioning democracies in the world. Unfortunately for everyone, the US isn’t one of them.
In Switzerland the presidency is rotated every six months between the biggest parties. They have public referendums four times per year. Unsurprisingly, they have highly functioning institutions.
That's just arguing over semantics, which just isn't helpful. US has one democratic action still in operation - voting for the president. And people voted for Trump having seen exactly what kind of administration he would lead - so this is what they get. So yes, this is democracy in action, even if other nations do it better.
It is only possible due to the United States of America’s flawed system of government. With this much centralised power, this will inevitably be the end result.
You had two realistic choices for president in the previous election, one that hasn’t even been selected in any form of democratic process. They both spent billions of dollars to try to get elected.
Why is Donald Trump in power right now? Because of a public democratic vote. The core issue is that people voted for him specifically.
>>It is only possible due to the United States of America’s flawed system of government.
Agreed. Doesn't change the fact that if people didn't vote for Trump he wouldn't be in power. Again, democratic action.
>>one that hasn’t even been selected in any form of democratic process.
Does switzerland have a vote for who is going to be a candidate for president? Or does the public not actually get a vote given that "presidency is rotated between parties"?
The president of Switzerland is rotated between the largest political parties and is only president for one year. The president of Switzerland has extremely limited power due to the decentralised nature of their government. It is not a position comparable to any other country.
In Switzerland it is not possible for one individual to wreak havoc like what is currently being done in the USA.
https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/federal-presidency.html#:~...
I agree with you main point (power is more decentralised), but the office of the president isn't the important part here.
The president (who is a member of the federal council) is just a largely ceremonial role whose only actual additional political power is having a tie-breaker vote - something that is rarely relevant given that the council has seven members.
The really important part about the Swiss government (i.e. the federal council) is that there are seven equal heads of government instead of one and that they are a perpetual coalition government consisting of all the major parties weighted by their actual parliamentary representation - something that btw isn't written down anywhere it's just an informal tradition that has been kept alive for decades.
I don't disagree with you. But Trump specifically has been selected by the people through a democratic process, we don't disagree here, correct?
My general point is - despite everything else going wrong at every other level of the government, American people, the common Joes of the land, had one very simple option - not voting for Trump. They had this power(arguably, very little in the grand scheme of things, but still) and they decided to use it to elect him and give full mandate to his administration. The rest of America is not a functional democracy like you said - but the fact that Trump is in charge is squarely in the hands of the American people.
Because the option are so restricted, and the people’s influence of the politics, I do not consider the US democratic.
Yes there was a vote, but it is not sufficient. The people don’t hold the power.
The people hold the power to elect or not elect Trump though! I cannot possibly be any clearer about this, and I really hope you don't disagree with this!
It would be democratic in name only if it was like Russia - where you still have elections but somehow the leading candidate wins with 99% of the vote(sometimes even above 100%!). So you have the disguise of a democratic process but the underlying mechanisms don't function.
I honestly don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. You said "this is NOT democracy in action". Trump being the president IS democracy, the US presidential elections are democratic even if the rest of the US isn't. The nature of US being or not being a democracy isn't what I took an issue with, because I do actually think we agree there.
The USA has the lowest form of democracy, where the population cast a vote on a king every four years, hence why I call it only nominally democratic. To make it worse the candidates are already predetermined by powerful people who are vaguely known to the population.
This is why Trump got elected, because for all his faults, he is an outsider to this corrupt system, in the opinion of the voting public. I also think most people expected a rerun of the 2016-2020 period, where he spent more time golfing than actually doing something.
So like I said right at the start, we're playing semantics.
>>Like in Switzerland, where people vote on referendums 4 times a year.
That's a standard that literally every country other than Switzerland will fail though.
What is the point of discussing politics, if you have no influence.
Because regardless of the (numerous) faults of democracy in general, and American democracy in particular, 77 million people actively stood up and said "This is what I want". Tens of millions more knew perfectly well that this is what would happen, and chose not to intervene.
I would say that this is the root cause of the problem. Maybe in a better system, those 77 million people wouldn't have been the dominant force. But it's clear that this is not just one person exploiting a loophole. He has the support of tens of millions of people.
I'd also say that this is entirely about ending centralized power. The EPA only exists because the federal government compels it on everybody. This is ending federal involvement.
They could have chosen not to vote for Trump. That was always an option.
>>Trump didn't win because he is good, he won because people didn't see any fruitful policies from Joe Biden/Kamala Harris.
So what was that vote then? Out of spite? I could believe that in 2016 - but now I absolutely don't. People have seen what 4 years of Trump look like, and they voted to have that again. Biden being or not being competent has literally nothing to do with it - everyone who voted for Trump did so because they saw what his 4 years of presidency looked like and they like it. If they say otherwise they are just lying to themselves first and foremost.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but here are a few real bullets from their list:
> Reconsideration of Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards that shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses (PM 2.5 NAAQS)
Opportunities for them to decrease air quality?
> Restructuring the Regional Haze Program that threatened the supply of affordable energy for American families (Regional Haze)
Definitely looking forward to some more regional haze
> Reconsideration of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants (MATS)
Who doesn't love mercury and other toxins in their air?
> Reconsideration of wastewater regulations for coal power plants to help unleash American energy (Oil and Gas ELG)
Presumably unleashing it directly into our water supply
Obviously the wishy-washy wording in each of these bullets (reconsider, restructure, etc) leaves a lot of leeway for how much actual change will happen. But it's pretty remarkable to me that the premise is getting rid of wasteful, unnecessary regulation but the actual topics are things like unhealthy particulate matter and toxins in the air or coal plant waste in the water. Where to draw the line can and should be a topic of reasonable debate, but one would think any effort to move the line towards "more stuff in your air and water" would take a more tactful approach.
Tangential to the press release itself, but it's a very interesting note on coordinated messaging that the phrase "Biden-Harris administration" still remains ubiquitous among Republican sources despite being a relatively uncommon way to refer to past Presidential administrations and something that came up basically out of nowhere last year when Biden stepped aside and Harris became the nominee. There's clearly a style guide and man are they sticking to it.
I’ve read that due to the abundance of natural gas, it’s simply not economical for companies to mine for coal or burn it. So I doubt many companies will be firing up new coal plants.
But then again, was that mainly because of regulations?
However regular oil and gas, which is expanding, is also having clean air regulations torn up:
* Reconsideration of regulations throttling the oil and gas industry
* Reconsideration of mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program that imposed significant costs on the American energy supply (GHG Reporting Program)
* Reconsideration of Biden-Harris Administration Risk Management Program rule that made America’s oil and natural gas refineries and chemical facilities less safe (Risk Management Program Rule)
The first two allow for greater emissions during extraction and no requirement to record or report.
The third I threw in to highlight what appears to be fairly loaded language .. rolling back a Risk Management Program that made refineries less safe ?
That sounds like a strong opinion held by some refinery owners that really wanted a program tanked. I admit to not having looked into the details, but that does raise an eyebrow.
Natural gas is hard to transport and often needs to be liquified to travel overseas, so global prices vary widely.
I'd guess nothing. This seems aimed at gas. Coal is sort of coming along for the ride.
(This is assuming they revoke the rules properly, which given the last 60 days and Trump 1.0 seems unlikely.)
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-should-restart-sh...
The United States should restart shuttered coal-fired power plants under President Donald Trump’s national energy emergency declaration, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a video interview with Bloomberg News on Monday.
...
"I think as part of the national energy emergency which President Trump has declared we’ve got to keep every plant open. And if there have been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on," he said.
I don't know who would want to operate the unprofitable units, or who would pay to make up the difference, or if permanently-closed units are even in a state such that they could be reactivated. Companies with recently-retired plants may want to expedite major equipment demolition to ensure that they can't be roped into a bad plan.
Maybe I'm fantasizing, but isn't there some country with some law that companies operating there are required to buy from environmentally friendly suppliers...
That argument is bullshit though because the EPA administrator is saying things like "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion...". That's not the speech of a well meaning person trying to find the right balance between environmental protection and human activity.
We have lots of natural gas, it burns cleaner than coal, and we're strongly embracing LNG exports. Europe doesn't have much natural gas, which would make nuclear a good counterpart to solar, but Greenpeace doesn't like that, so they'll wind up buying our gas.
(The best I can come up with for these specific rule changes is trashing the market for carbon credits neuters a significant cash stream for Tesla.)
Where? Given we're talking about energy transport, any analysis will be sensitive to the assumptions made about the carbon intensity of said transport.
Note that their comparison appears to be LNG vs conventional natural gas. So burning gas produced in Pennsylvania in Germany vs burning it it Pennsylvania.
If they have control of the house and senate, they should just pass legislation.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended two days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
"Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.
But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.
What's up with that?
Sounds better for the environment than I'd feared...