Richard Killmer: EPA needs to move quicker, more forcefully to reach Biden climate goals

Soon after it was clear that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, there was speculation that we had seen the last effort for the next two years to make headway on President Biden’s climate goal reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by achieving a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

However, there are several important actions that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the rest of Biden Administration can do to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. One important move is to ensure that the EPA quickly issues regulations that would affect the power sector — companies that make electricity.

The speed factor is real. Out of the 10 regulations that have to do with companies that make electricity, nine of the 10 are now delayed. These include:

• Carbon standards for new power plants

• Mercury and air toxics standards

• Water pollution standards

• National soot standards

The nation simply cannot afford these additional delays if we're going to meet Biden’s climate and environmental justice goals.

The EPA is working to strengthen the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for fine particulate matter, otherwise known as soot. Soot causes up to 200,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, and disproportionately harms communities of color. EPA sent its proposed rule for interagency review in August, but this rule is now on track to be finalized in March 2023.

Fine particulate matter comes from smokestacks, construction, diesel-fueled 18-wheelers, power plants and other industrial activity. It has a diameter of no more than 2.5 micrometers, one-thirtieth the width of a human hair, and can become embedded in the lungs. It is linked to heart attacks, stroke and respiratory ailments.

The draft rule by the Environmental Protection Agency would tighten the current limit, which has been in place since 2012, by as much as 25 percent. The Administration estimates that it could prevent as many as 4,200 premature deaths annually, as well as 270,000 missed workdays per year, and result in up to $43 billion in net health and economic savings by 2032. Research commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund last year estimated that exposure to this pollutant killed 120,000 people annually in the United States, with the death rate three times higher for Blacks than for whites.

Issued Friday, Jan. 6, after years of study and strife, the draft rule inches toward tighter regulation of this pollutant tied to tens of thousands of deaths annually, but does not go as far as agency expert advisers recommended. It would cut the current annual exposure limit for soot from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to either 9 or 10 micrograms. But the proposal leaves the current daily standard — set in 2006 — unchanged at 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

Last summer in 2022, however, more than 100 other groups urged the EPA to cut both the annual and daily soot limits to the lowest levels recommended by the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific

Advisory Committee, a group of outside experts that urged a cut in the annual exposure limit to between 25 and 30 micrograms. The majority also recommended a reduction in the annual limit to between 8 and 10 micrograms. But at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a senior official called for the existing standards to be left in place.

A decade has passed since EPA last tightened its exposure standards; the new proposal would overturn a bitterly contested Trump-era decision to leave those limits unchanged.

Two things need to happen. The Soot Rule needs to be as strong as possible, so that the lives of thousands can be saved. And the EPA and the rest of the Biden Administration needs to move quickly with all of the power sector regulations so that the climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 can be achieved.

— Rev. Richard Killmer, a retired Presbyterian minister, lives in East Grand Rapids.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Richard Killmer: EPA needs to move quicker, more forcefully