How Recent America Updates Have Impacted Environmental Policies
America Updates Have Impacted Environmental Policies
The United States (USA) is a vast and diverse country shaped by waves of immigration from Europe, Asia and elsewhere. It’s home to world-renowned universities, a rich culture of art and music and an unparalleled natural beauty. But it’s also a place where many environmental problems are exacerbated by climate change.
The federal government has a role to play in addressing these challenges, including protecting the environment, improving energy security and economic growth, and creating jobs. To balance these goals, the U.S. has a wide range of policies addressing issues such as air quality, water availability and waste management. Some of these policies are designed to prevent environmental harm, while others regulate actions by private entities, such as factories that discharge pollutants into the environment.
In the years since President Trump’s inauguration, the Administration has pursued major deregulation of these laws and rules. The Administration has replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and gas extraction bans, revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, and rolled back the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule. The Administration’s approach to these rules has significant impacts on our economy and our planet, and will have lasting consequences for how future administrations apply and enforce environmental laws and regulations.
How Recent America Updates Have Impacted Environmental Policies
As the country grapples with climate change, communities across America are working to improve their resiliency. These local efforts, combined with recent investment through the Investing in America’s Climate Resilience initiative, are helping communities address the climate risks they face, such as weather extremes and greenhouse gas emissions. But they do not fully address the need to make climate policy more equitable.
One key step toward this goal is ensuring that environmental reviews and permitting processes are fair, effective, efficient, and transparent for all. To that end, the Biden-Harris Administration has released a proposal today to modernize and accelerate federal environmental reviews while continuing to ensure strong community engagement and advancing environmental justice.
The proposed rule will increase efficiency by encouraging agencies to consider a project’s mitigation measures to reduce the scope of the environmental review and allowing them to establish categorical exclusions for projects requiring no further environmental review. It will also strengthen community engagement by requiring agencies to identify Chief Public Engagement Officers who are responsible for implementing their agency’s outreach and engagement programs.
Newly available data have also opened up opportunities to better understand the economic effects of environmental policies. For example, research using linked data enables us to follow workers over time before and after environmental policies take effect, revealing the long-run earnings losses from regulation-induced job transitions or nonemployment. This is important because the benefits of reducing emissions cannot be separated from those from enabling job creation and economic recovery. Research enabled by newly available data can also reveal that, even within industries, individual plants and firms differ from each other in ways that impact the overall welfare effects of policies.