Fossil fuel companies get direct email line to Trump for exemption requests | Trump administration

The Donald Trump administration gave fossil fuel companies an extraordinary opportunity to evade air pollution rules by simply sending an email to the US President to ask him to be exempted.

Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) He prepared a new email address Where what he calls a “organized society” can request a presidential exemption from their requirements under Clean air lawWhich is used to regulate dangerous toxins emitted from polluted sources.

Workmanships of power stations that burn coal or oil, linked For tens of thousands From deaths every year in the United States via mercury, arsenic and other substances that cause cancer emitted through air pollution, until Monday to ask Trump to allow them to overcome clean air laws.

“The president will make a decision on the advantages of” each request, which can be for up to two years and is renewed, according to EPA. Useful, the Environmental Protection Agency website provides a template for these requests, including indicators on how to successfully request exemption.

Trump pledged as a presidential candidate to cancel environmental laws If he gets $ 1 billion in campaign donations From oil and gas companies. While he did not reach this number, Trump Have you received tens of millions of dollars from industry? He said that the United States needs “drilling, child, drilling” by expanding unrestricted fossil fuels, and the rejection of the scientific consensus that burning coal, oil and gas causes an aggravated climate crisis.

As a president, Trump began to dismantle the rules of pollution. Dozens of declines by the Environmental Protection Agency targeted the regulations that were It aims to save nearly 200,000 lives in the United States by 2050Also, prevent millions of asthma attacks, heart problems, respiratory system and other general health damages.

However, rewriting these rules will take some time, which means that Trump has turned into a mysterious angle and rarely used from the clean air law to suspend pollution rules in the meantime. Under the law, presidents can exempt business from pollution requirements if the technology needed to meet the standard is not available and that this is in the national security services of the United States.

Environmental groups have said that power stations have used technology to reduce pollutants for years and that the new email exemption was a famous attempt by side air laws. “These guarantees protect the health and welfare of our societies and there is no legal basis for their suspension,” said Lori Williams, director of the Coal Player Campaign in Sierra Club.

“The Environmental Protection Agency must abandon this funny suggestion now, and do its work of holding fossil fuel companies according to the current air pollution standards.”

Vicky Patton, General Adviser to the Environmental Defense Fund at the Green Environmental Defense Group, said that the decision to establish the email presented by Lee Zeladen, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, was “severe abuse and inappropriate for the powers of the clean air law, which only allows exemptions from protecting biotechnology in very narrow conditions.”

“This is the Trump -led effort agency to evade the boundary on toxic pollution that protects millions of people across the United States.”

Patton organized on Thursday a Request for the Freedom of Information Law For all submissions to the portal, including the names of all entities that require exemptions. The group pledged to “go to the court if necessary” to obtain the records, and make it public.

“[T]”The American public deserves to know what Trump is doing the Environmental Protection Agency and pollutants for the air they breathe.”

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency said: “Section 112 (1) (4) specifically stipulates that the president may exempt any fixed source” if the president decides that technology to implement such a standard is not available and that it is in the interests of the United States to do so. “