Gina McCarthy's Return to Politics After Obama Tenure - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
The Trump administration’s actions on the mercury rule especially infuriated McCarthy. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that can lead to impaired vision, muscle weakness, and changes in mental function. Children and unborn infants are the most vulnerable. As Obama’s last EPA head and a top air-pollution official at the agency before that, McCarthy was intimately involved in drafting the rule, which she said was broadly accepted by all parties.
-
“I had been working on mercury standards for 12 years,” she told me. “Who doesn’t know that mercury is bad for you? It’s the origin of the phrase mad as a hatter.”
-
The EPA finalized changes to the mercury rule on April 16, declaring it not “appropriate and necessary.” Industry groups and environmentalists alike had opposed alterations. There’s “no basis to repeal these important and long-overdue” protections, Exelon, a major utility company, wrote to regulators in a 2019 public comment.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
Although the Trump administration did not reverse the mercury rule entirely, the modifications were intended to make clear that Trump officials disagree with the Obama administration’s basis for drafting it in the first place, and that the new rule is “correcting flaws” in the logic. They say that the costs of complying with the mercury rule would exceed the environmental benefit. Environmentalists worry that the changes could limit regulators’ ability to control toxins in the future.
-
The Trump administration’s squabbling over the rule drove McCarthy “absolutely nuts,” she said. “That’s when I realized what they were doing made no sense from a standard-setting process. It was just to destroy everything that had been done before. It had no explanation otherwise.”