Federal environmental regulations such as the Clean Water Rule and the Clean Power Plan shouldn’t be struck down by the Trump Administration just because they were issued under President Obama, according to Gina McCarthy, former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“None of [the Obama-era rules] should be touched unless the [Trump] administration has a real reason to touch it other than it was done during the Obama administration, and that’s the problem that we see,” McCarthy said in a February 20, 2018 interview on BuzzFeed’s morning livestream program “AM to DM.”
McCarthy is Professor of the Practice of Public Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment.
Discussing the Trump Administration’s proposed repeal of the Clean Water Rule, McCarthy said, “All that rule did was…to make sure that we’re protecting the rivers and streams that are necessary to ensure safe drinking water and fishable and swimmable waters. And the Clean Power Plan was one of the premier steps that the Obama Administration took to make sure that we were regulating for the first time and setting standards for carbon pollution from our utilities. And that’s essential to keep in place not just domestically, but to ensure the international world that we haven’t lost our way, that we really do want to be part of the international effort to resolve climate change.”
McCarthy also discussed the EPA’s shrinking staff and the removal of references to climate change on the EPA website.
Listen to Gina McCarthy’s comments on BuzzFeed “AM to DM”
Read an article from The Hill: Obama EPA chief: Trump regulation rollbacks won’t hold up legally
Learn more
McCarthy: Science is under attack at EPA under Trump (Harvard Chan School news)