The USA and the fight against pollution, repeal all of Trump's decisions

Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia officially repealed the decisions taken by the Trump administration regarding regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. This is a very important ruling, which basically gives the Biden administration carte blanche to resume work, through the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), on pollutant emissions regulations, which its predecessor was trying to reduce to historic lows.

Some implications of this story even date back to the Clinton administration, during which the then President forced the hand of the EPA in order to insert new regulations on polluting emissions of carbon dioxide, thanks to the Clean Air Act; the final confirmation then came during the George W. Bush administration, defining how carbon dioxide should be considered a polluting gas, and therefore to be regulated within the Clean Air Act.

During the Obama administration we had started to go in the right direction, with the Clean Power Plan that should finally have clearly regulated these aspects; However, the text was blocked by several lawsuits and remained blocked for years, until Trump decided to eliminate it completely and replace it with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) regulation. ACE not only marked the end of the Clean Power Plant, but sought to further limit the scope for intervention of the Clean Air Act, allowing individual states to regulate the gaseous emissions of each individual pollutant source, rather than assessing the state as a whole. . All this greatly lengthening the bureaucratic times for the implementation of the few containment actions envisaged by the text. In short, the EPA found itself with its hands tied, unable to force the abandonment of the use of coal as a source of energy: it goes without saying that the Trump administration's approach has absolutely not helped to reduce CO2 emissions. .

"The key operating terms of the ACE regulation, as well as those of the previously repealed Clean Power Plan, arise from an incorrect interpretation of the Clean Air Act. Furthermore, the amendments made to the ACE regulation clearly slow down the process reduction of emissions, in an arbitrary and non-homogeneous way with respect to the objectives sought. "

It will therefore be the task of the Biden administration, which on more than one occasion has reiterated its intention to rely on science and facts to move the country forward, find a way to take the right path again in terms of polluting emissions. The medium-term goal is to abandon the use of coal as soon as possible - at a national level - replacing it with natural gas, while for the more distant future it will be necessary to rely on renewable energy; to do all this we need a new plan, which will undoubtedly come very soon.