(See update at end) The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disputed Monday a New York Times report, which suggested that the agency plans to adjust its pollution health risk projections to justify its repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP).
The Times released the report Monday that the EPA plans to change the way it calculates the future health risks of air pollution, which would predict thousands of fewer deaths and justify the rollback of the CPP.
The EPA has released the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule as a less onerous alternative to the CPP.
The Times suggested that the rule change would “dramatically reduce the 1,400 additional premature deaths per year.”
Times reporter Lisa Friedman said that William Wehrum, the EPA air quality chief, confirmed in an interview that the new analysis would be included in the final ACE rule, which the EPA contends is false because it is not using the proposed new methodology in the ACE proposal.
EPA spokesman James Hewitt said in a statement to Breitbart News Monday:
To be clear, there is no new methodology related to particulate matter included in the cost-benefit analysis accompanying the final Affordable Clean Energy rule. EPA sets national ambient air quality standards at a level that protects public health with a margin of safety. A longstanding and important question is how much benefit is derived by further reducing ambient levels below the national standards. We are considering changes to how such benefits are calculated. No change to this scientific method will be made unless and until the new approach has been peer reviewed. EPA is constantly evaluating approaches to improve transparency and communicate uncertainty regarding costs and benefits of its regulatory actions.
The Times also suggested that the new method for calculating health risks associated with EPA rules has “never been peer-reviewed and is not scientifically sound,” even though the EPA said that the new methodology would not be a part of the final ACE rule.
“Nearly the entire country meets EPA’s national standards for particulate matter, which were last updated in 2012. The U.S. has among the lowest particulate matter concentrations in the world (these levels have dropped by more than 40 percent since 2000),” Hewitt added. “The Affordable Clean Energy rule would result in significant reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases as well as precursors of particulate matter and ozone from the power sector.”
In an interview with Breitbart News in March, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler suggested that the media, leftists, and other environmental activists have voraciously attacked the agency due to its success in unraveling Obama’s climate agenda.
“We are moving forward, we are being successful, and there are some people that don’t want us to be successful, people who support the Green New Deal, people who don’t want the ‘energy domination’ we’re having. You know, the natural gas we produce, the coal, the oil that we produced this year that we’re exporting is more environmentally-conscious mining of those fossil fuels than anywhere else in the world,” Wheeler said.
“Our natural gas resources are much cleaner than any other natural gas being drilled in Russia, for example. So, if another country wants to buy fossil fuel on the open market, they should look to the United States; we do everything in a much more environmentally-conscious manner than anyone else,” the EPA chief charged.
UPDATE 1: The New York Times made substantial changes to an article claiming the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will use new modeling that minimizes projected deaths from air pollution. The Times, however, did not issue a correction as of Tuesday morning, despite making substantial edits to the initial story. For more information, read more at Daily Caller.
Read more at Breitbart
We need to remember that the Clean Power Plan was an effort for the United States to meet the requirements of the Paris Treaty. However, that was not the official justification. The official reason was the claim that current particulate pollution level was too high. In order justify the CPP the Obama administration set ridiculously low standards of particulate pollution. As the article pointed out, we already have some of the cleanest air in the world. This whole issue is about using a lame excuse to try to meet the requirements of the Treaty.
“The Times suggested that the rule change would “dramatically reduce the 1,400 additional premature deaths per year.”
Why do they pretend to care about human life? We all know they are willing to sacrifice hundreds of millions of people for their agenda.
“These were the bad projects. As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change. This offends a lot of people, and that’s probably one of the things where people will say I shouldn’t come back, either. And I’d like to talk about that, because that’s really curious. Why is it it came up? And I’ll actually also try to get back to this because it’s probably one of the things that we’ll disagree with on the list that you wrote down.
The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto — or doing something more than Kyoto — is a bad deal is simply because it’s very inefficient. It’s not saying that global warming is not happening. It’s not saying that it’s not a big problem. But it’s saying that what we can do about it is very little, at a very high cost. What they basically show us, the average of all macroeconomic models, is that Kyoto, if everyone agreed, would cost about 150 billion dollars a year. That’s a substantial amount of money. That’s two to three times the global development aid that we give the Third World every year. Yet it would do very little good. All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100. So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106. Which is a little good, but not very much good. So the idea here really is to say, well, we’ve spent a lot of money doing a little good.
And just to give you a sense of reference, the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount, for about 75 billion dollars a year, we could solve all major basic problems in the world. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good? Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good? And that is really why it becomes a bad project. It’s not to say that if we had all the money in the world, we wouldn’t want to do it. But it’s to say, when we don’t, it’s just simply not our first priority.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities/transcript?language=en
The New York Pravda nothing but lies printed front page lies they waste the Freedom of t he Press by spewing Lies and just think that at one time all of NYC was a vast wilderness it was that way with the early settlers but now the only wild packs in the Big Apple are the gangs of thugs
Anyone willing to make sacrifices for pure air and water wouldn’t go near New York. What it’s really about is forcing others to make sacrifices for YOU! Selfish.