The Trump Administration's Environmental Record Will Be Written In Bones - Long, Detailed Article
EDIT
From home heating to jet fuel, around 80 percent of the country’s emissions stem from the burning of oil and gas. The release of methane, the primary constituent in natural gas, stokes a hotter climate — methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of 20 years. It’s a frighteningly powerful greenhouse gas that the Trump administration has made easier to emit.
Last August, the EPA eliminated all restrictions on methane emissions for new sources of the gas, like natural gas pipelines and new fracking sites, as well as removing the agency’s own ability to set methane standards for existing oil and gas facilities. That move followed a successful effort to get rid of methane rules on public lands. (The Trump administration also finalized a policy that will delay enforcement of emissions standards at municipal landfills that give off methane.) The Rhodium Group, a private research firm, estimates that these rollbacks will result in the equivalent of 638 million metric tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere through 2035, more than the annual emissions from the entire global aviation industry.
EDIT
The Trump administration also scrapped plans to ban chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic insecticide that the Obama administration had teed up for prohibition. Trump’s EPA abandoned the legal theory and rewrote the cost-benefit analysis behind the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule, which requires coal plants to limit their release of another neurotoxin, mercury, and is estimated to prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths annually. Further, the administration has also failed to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol — an international treaty signed in 1987 to phase out the use of planet-warming refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons. In fact, it has pursued a strategy of actually deregulating the chemicals, which carry thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a century.
The Clean Water Act, which has been on the books since 1972, was enacted to keep the country’s surface waters pristine. From the standpoint of water pollution, the greatest proportion of contaminants comes from wastewater released by steam-electric generating facilities, like coal-burning power plants, which create electricity by burning coal to boil water that in turn makes steam that spins a turbine to drive a generator. In 2015, the Obama administration put the first limits on the toxic metals that coal plants release through the effluent wastewater into rivers. The EPA estimated that every year the wastewater standards were in effect, up to 1.4 billion fewer pounds of lead, arsenic, mercury, selenium, and other toxic metals would end up in U.S. waters.
EDIT
https://grist.org/donald-trump-environmental-and-climate-rollbacks/
