February 6, 2021
President Biden has promised to reinstate more than 100 rules and regulations aimed at environmental protection that his predecessor rolled back. It won’t happen overnight.
President Biden, vowing to restore environmental protections frayed over the past four years, has ordered the review of more than 100 rules and regulations on air, water, public lands, endangered species and climate change that were weakened or rolled back by his predecessor according to a January 22nd New York Times report.
But legal experts warn that it could take two to three years — and in some cases, most of Mr. Biden’s term — to put many of the old rules back in place.
“People should temper their expectations about what can be done quickly,” said Kevin Minoli, who served as a lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. He added, “It’s very possible, more possible than not, that some of the Trump rules will still be in effect for a couple of years.”
Mr. Biden has an array of legal tools to reinstate environmental protections that were dismantled by the Trump administration. Gina McCarthy, his top domestic climate change adviser, headed the E.P.A. in the Obama administration and served as the chief author of some of the nation’s most comprehensive climate change rules. She has now reviewed every possible option to restore those protections, according to a White House official who is familiar with her thinking but was not authorized to speak on the record.
But those tools take time. Experts in environmental law who have spoken with top Biden administration officials said the process of rolling back the Trump-era rollbacks would quite likely fall into a few broad categories. In a limited set of cases, Mr. Biden will be able to use his executive authority immediately, for instance to cancel individual fossil fuel infrastructure projects or reinstate federal protections on distinct areas of land and water. He did that on day one when he rescinded the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil from Canadian oil sands across the American Midwest.
The White House announced January 21st that any new lease of drilling rights on public lands must have the personal approval of the highest-ranking officials at the Department of Interior — either the secretary or an assistant secretary.
Likewise, Mr. Biden is expected in the first months of his term to restore federal protections around at least two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. In 2017, Mr. Trump opened nearly two million acres around those monuments to mining, logging and drilling — at the time the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.
Patrick Parenteau, a professor of law with the Vermont Law School, said the Biden administration could also act quickly to block Mr. Trump’s push to drill in Alaska. In the last days of Mr. Trump’s administration, the Interior Department auctioned off oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Mr. Biden’s team has also looked to Congress, where Democrats could potentially use their razor-thin House and Senate majorities to revoke some of the Trump administration’s last-minute regulatory rollbacks. Under the Congressional Review Act, any regulation finalized within 60 legislative days of the end of a presidential term can be overturned with a simple congressional vote.
In the early days of the Trump administration, Republicans used that law to quickly wipe out 16 Obama-era rules. But legal experts have warned Democrats that using that law to undo environmental policies could backfire: once Congress has used it to wipe out a regulation, the administration is legally barred from enacting a substantially similar rule. That twist would bar the Biden administration from replacing a weak Trump-era rule with a similar but more stringent one.
Then there are the longer-term rollbacks. It could take two years or more for the administration to restore Obama-era climate change regulations, rolled back by the Trump administration, that were designed to cut emissions of planet-warming pollution across major sectors of the economy.
“When it comes to restoring the vast majority of these Obama environmental policies, the rollbacks were actually done by putting in place new regulations,” Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer representing fossil fuel companies who served in the E.P.A. in both Bush administrations. “In some cases that took two to three years. They will have to be replaced with new regulations. There is a legal process that has to be followed.”
The work of reinstating the federal government’s more comprehensive regulations on air, water and climate pollution will take even longer. A key reason, explained legal experts: when the Trump administration rolled back those rules, they almost never eliminated them entirely. Rather, they replaced strict federal pollution regulations with new, weaker pollution regulations.
The Biden administration, in turn, will seek to legally undo those weak regulations and replace them with pollution controls even tougher than those implemented by the Obama administration.
“It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, who was on Mr. Biden’s short list to run the E.P.A.
“No one doubts the E.P.A.’s authority to put these regulations back in place,” Mr. Revesz said. “But they can’t just make the Trump rules go away by executive order. They have to follow the same process — preparing all the scientific and economic analyses, and you have to get all that right.”
Mr. Revesz noted that after four years in which the staff and budget of the E.P.A. has shrunk, the agency is now being asked to do far more with far fewer resources.
“They want to do a lot, but they can’t do it all at the same time,” Mr. Revesz said. “E.P.A. has suffered the loss of a lot of senior staff. They’ll need to prioritize. So, they may not get to some of these until the end of a first term.”
What this means to you
President Biden, vowing to restore environmental protections frayed over the past four years, has ordered the review of more than 100 rules and regulations that were weakened or rolled back by Donald Trump. But legal experts warn that it could take two to three years — and in some cases, most of Mr. Biden’s term — to put many of the old rules back in place.
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