Trump 2.0's Deregulation of Chemicals Has Begun

Yahoo

31-01-2025

Last week, Trump appointed two veterans of his first administration, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, to lead chemical regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency. Beck is a chemical industry lobbyist. Dekleva is currently senior director at the American Chemistry Council, an organization whose positions include opposing the EPA's recent, arguably belated ban on noncritical uses of methylene chloride—a chemical so toxic that it has been shown to poison even trained workers using protective gear. These appointments, while buried beneath the landslide of other headlines out of the White House over the past week, served as a critical indicator: Specifically, they dashed the (limited) hopes some advocates were nursing that right-wingers' newish preoccupation with environmental health—embodied primarily in the chaotic figure of Trump's Health and Human Services nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—might make the second Trump administration marginally more environmentally friendly on chemical and plastics regulation than the first one.
The Washington Post, covering the appointments, highlighted the typical rationale for appointing industry insiders to such posts: that the EPA's chemical approval process needs reform. 'The EPA's flawed decision-making process has consequently inhibited American innovation and our ability to compete in the global market,' according to Republican Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky. The Post also quoted lawyer Dimitri Karakitsos, who has represented chemical companies, arguing the approval process for new chemicals is actually impeding environmental progress: 'A lot of these new chemicals tend to be greener and safer, and we want that innovation on the market,' he said.
Is that true? It's a counterintuitive take, given that the EPA has come under heavy criticism in recent years for failing to ban even chemicals that dozens of other countries have chosen to ban over links to severe health damage. I called two experts to get their perspectives on the matter.
'I actually do think that there are tremendous innovations and discoveries of new chemicals happening today,' Yale School of the Environment professor and former director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program Paul Anastas told me. 'And yes … when you can demonstrate these things—that it's safer, greener, performs better—there should be a more effective way of fast-tracking these innovations into the marketplace so that they can make their positive benefits.' At the same time, he said, 'the role of science at EPA is fundamental, and everything that the EPA does must be science-based.'
A key part of the industry position, however, is that U.S. regulatory procedures are somehow exceptionally obstructive, particularly in an international context. Those with experience in this international context say that argument doesn't hold up.
'The idea that U.S. chemical regulation is so advanced that it hinders and slows down U.S. competitivity is preposterous,' said David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, over the phone from Geneva. The U.S. has 'the least stringent, least efficient, and least protective legislation compared to any of the other major economies—and that includes economies like the EU of course, which is the most often mentioned, but also includes Korea, Japan, even China.' The EU, for example, 'regulates or bans over 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics. The U.S. bans less than two dozen.'
The anti-regulatory argument also rests on the assumption that regulating to prevent environmental harm slows innovation. But when CIEL investigated this in 2013, Azoulay said, using patent applications as a proxy for innovation, 'every time there was a new type of regulatory control measure being put in place around phthalates, we saw a spike in a number of patents being filed for new products or new substances or new applications that didn't use phthalates.' He also pointed to a wealth of recent research showing that, contrary to the assumption that regulations hurt the economy, under-regulating harmful chemicals can cost billions of dollars.
These studies probably aren't going to prevent people from arguing that EPA regulations harm American companies' ability to compete. 'An additional perspective that's useful to consider,' Azoulay added, 'is that, contrary to some simplified beliefs, the chemical industry is very much a global industry. All of those major chemical producers are multinationals that have production bases in the U.S., in Europe, in China, in the Gulf, in other places, that try to take advantage of being closest to the primary materials or the markets or whatever.' And the arguments everywhere seem to be the same: 'Those rules in that particular jurisdiction are hindering competitivity. But because it's the same companies making the same arguments, what they're actually doing is trying to bring the floor down, and trying to lower the level of protection of health and the environment.'
If the track record of the first Trump administration is any indicator, those companies may be pleased by what happens next at the EPA. Then again, maybe they won't. When the first Trump administration tried to weaken methylene chloride regulations, for example, they were quickly and repeatedly sued. Rushed, poorly evidenced environmental rollbacks in the first Trump administration were what allowed groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council to boast that 'on average, we sued once every ten days for four years, and we won victories in nearly 90 percent of the resolved cases.' As these battles play out, however, many fear the toll—to insufficiently protected workers, to the people passively absorbing toxic chemicals in their environment, and to ecosystems—may mount.A new study pushes back against earlier ones suggesting that the Atlantic Ocean's system of currents is slowing down. This study finds no evidence of the system weakening at all—very good news, given that, as previously discussed in this newsletter, a lot of agriculture depends on the weather systems that depend, in turn, on these currents.
Maryland's renewable energy program isn't working, a new report suggests. Inside Climate News's Aman Azhar explains the findings and talks to the report's authors, who say this is a 'well-known problem in the state that people don't want to talk about.'A previous edition of this newsletter noted that a so-called attribution study of climate change's contribution to the L.A. fires might take time. Only two weeks later, a report from the World Weather Attribution group calculates that climate change made the hot, dry, windy conditions that helped the fires spread 35 percent more likely.Kentucky's Mountaintop Mines Are Turned Into Neighborhoods
Old coal mines that blew the tops off mountains have left lots of manmade plateaus in Kentucky. While these 'ecological graveyards' may not be as lush as the landscape they've replaced, Austyn Gaffney writes, they may prove to be a lifeline in a state struggling to adapt to increasingly severe floods:
In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.… Seven communities across four counties, with aspirational names like Skyview and Olive Branch, have been designed for 665 brand-new properties, some of which will run on solar. Fourteen houses have been completed and about a dozen people have moved in to two communities called Thompson Branch and Wayland, according to the state.
Read Austyn Gaffney and Jon Cherry's feature in The New York Times.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.