From The Texas Tribune:
The first year of President Trump’s second term has seen an aggressive rollback of federal environmental protections, which advocacy groups fear will bring more pollution, higher health risks, and less information and power for Texas communities, especially in heavily industrial and urban areas.
Within Trump’s first 100 days in office, his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced a sweeping slate of 31 deregulatory actions. The list, which Zeldin called the agency’s “greatest day of deregulation,” targeted everything from soot standards and power plant pollution rules to the Endangerment Finding, the legal and scientific foundation that obligates the EPA to regulate climate-changing pollution under the Clean Air Act.
Since then, the agency froze research grants, shrank its workforce, and removed some references to climate change and environmental justice from its website — moves that environmental advocates say send a clear signal: the EPA’s new direction will come at the expense of public health.
Cyrus Reed, conservation director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said Texas is one of the states that feels EPA policy changes directly because the state has shown little interest in stepping up its environmental enforcement as the federal government scales back.
“If we were a state that was open to doing our own regulations there’d be less impact from these rollbacks,” Reed said. “But we’re not.”
“Now we have an EPA that isn’t interested in enforcing its own rules,” he added.
Richard Richter, a spokesperson at the state’s environmental agency, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said in a statement that the agency takes protecting public health and natural resources seriously and acts consistently and quickly to enforce federal and state environmental laws when they’re violated.
