Trump’s Plan for Coal Industry Revival Means Big EPA Changes

Via Newsmax:

President-elect Donald Trump’s goal to jump-start the coal industry will likely mean tossing out the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate control agenda, the Washington Examiner reports.

Under Trump, the EPA is expected to focus on “genuine pollutants” that pose immediate problems to the public’s well-being. It would move away from carbon pollution, which has been blamed for causing man-made globe warming.

“He’s very much for clean air and clean water,” Kathleen Hartnett-White, a member of Trump’s economic advisory council, told the Washington Examiner. “But the better home for considering this discussion about carbon dioxide and climate is in the Department of Energy.”

She said regulating carbon dioxide “is the killer of coal.”

“Carbon dioxide has no adverse impact in the air we breath at all,” Hartnett-White said. “It’s a harmless trace gas that is actually an essential nutrient for plants.”

But even with regulatory rollbacks, experts are split on whether the coal industry can rebound, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported.

The National Mining Association, which congratulated Trump on his victory, noted that, “a robust mining industry is only possible with reasonable laws and regulations that balance costs with benefits in pursuit of reasonable goals.”

According to the Gazette-Mail, James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at the West Virginia University College of Law added: “In my view, the election is not going to have much impact on the prospects for the coal industry in West Virginia going forward, Environmental regulations were not significant drivers in the decline of the industry, and scaling them back is not going to revive it.

See the article here.