Trump's Environment Rollbacks Won't Stick, Obama's EPA Head Says

Bloomberg discusses President Trump’s rollback of Obama-era environment and climate regulations with Myron Ebell.

President Donald Trump’s moves to roll back Obama-era environmental and climate regulations won’t stick, according to his predecessor’s environmental chief.

Neither the science nor the law is on Trump’s side as the administration moves to repeal rules governing water pollution, carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants and methane leaks from oil and gas wells, said Gina McCarthy, who led the Environmental Protection Agency for nearly four years under former President Barack Obama.

“I don’t think this administration understands how to do a rule in a robust way,” McCarthy said in a meeting with Bloomberg News reporters and editors in Washington. “Nothing that they do here is going to stand up to science scrutiny or legal scrutiny.”

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“President Obama and his administration are discovering that what can be done through executive fiat in a rulemaking without legislation by Congress can be undone by executive fiat and rulemaking,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of Trump’s transition team.

Ebell said he had “every confidence” the Trump administration would succeed in reversing Obama’s environmental legacy, in part because the efforts are being led by Pruitt, who mounted legal challenges of many of the same rules he is now undoing in his previous role as Oklahoma attorney general.

“There is a good reason why Scott Pruitt was picked to be EPA administrator over other candidates,” Ebell said. “He is a very sharp lawyer and he is connected to some very sharp lawyers.”

Read the full article at Bloomberg.