Trump's EPA rule changes remind me of Michigan before Flint water crisis | Opinion

Where have I heard this before?

Last week, newly appointed Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin released a video refocusing the agency’s 55-year-old mission: As the EPA rolls back dozens of regulations that limit the amount of toxic chemicals in our air, Zeldin said the agency would focus not on protecting the environment or public health, but on making it cheaper to heat your home, buy a car … and run a business.

Oh, right ― it’s a flashback to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality under former Gov. Rick Snyder.

Remember him? Of course you do. The business-oriented governor who ran for election promising to revive Michigan’s economy, on whose watch the worst environmental catastrophe in the state’s history, the Flint water crisis happened.

Under Snyder’s governance, the MDEQ rewrote its mission statement. Second of the department’s three guiding principles: “Be full partners in Michigan’s economic development.”

How did that work out?

Environmental regulation requires business to do not just what is cost-effective, but what is right. Business employs its own advocates, and funds that work from deep pockets. Environmental regulators do the taxpayers’ business on the taxpayers’ dime, and they’re supposed to advocate for us.

I can’t tell you that there’s a direct link between the Snyder MDEQ’s business-friendly posture and the Flint water crisis. State officials weren’t trying to facilitate business growth in Flint, so much as hoping the problem would just go away.

But I can tell you that when a department that’s supposed to protect us loses its way, things don’t turn out so well.

A great deal of ire

Zeldin talks a lot about unleashing things ― America’s full potential, the economy, greatness, American energy, I could go on ― but the changes at the EPA are the Trump Administration’s latest attempt to deny, at scale, the existence and impacts of climate change.

Zeldin called the regulatory rollbacks ― which will probably be stopped by the courts ― a blow against the “green new scam,” right-wing parlance for the “green new deal,” a set of pro-environmental economic development legislation that never actually passed. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Zeldin said that he’s “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”

Snyder, at least, never went that far.

I haven’t tallied them up, but I’d bet a shiny nickel that the regulatory changes called for in Project 2025 ― the document’s authors devote an entire chapter and a great deal of ire toward the EPA, and really, really hate that climate change is a real thing ― are the very rollbacks announced by Zeldin last week. Climate change, in this world, isn’t settled science, but the enemy of American business and American prosperity, a pretense that justifies a radical left-wing agenda.

That happened in Michigan, too.

Saving the planet

When Snyder’s MDEQ director, Dan Wyant, resigned in 2016 ― one of just a handful of government employees who faced any sort of penalty as a consequence of the Flint water crisis ― the governor’s then-chief of staff wrote in an email to a PR consultant: “Keep in mind that finding a replacement who has the trust of the business community will be very difficult.”

But Snyder quickly found just the person: Former BP lobbyist Heidi Grether, who managed the company’s response to an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon deep-sea rig that resulted in oil equivalent to 3.1 million barrels pumping into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. Grether’s LinkedIn page bragged that her accomplishments on the oil giant’s payroll included “no legislation adverse to BP being introduced in the Gulf states” following the marine disaster.

Grether helmed the MDEQ until Snyder left office.

That same year, Free Press environment reporter Keith Matheny reviewed state records, detailing a list of decisions made by state regulators, writing that “on a number of high-profile environmental matters in recent years — as in Flint — DEQ officials seemingly have downplayed public health concerns in the name of economic development; and how attempts to follow exactly and only what was required under state and federal regulations trumped protective action.”

Two years later, the Legislature created so-called “polluter panels” that allowed industry “experts” to oversee MDEQ rulemaking and override MDEQ permitting decisions, which is a little bit like asking a very hungry fox to regulate the safety of the henhouse. Permits are a central component of environmental regulation. Regulators issue permits allowing businesses to release a set amount of toxic chemicals into our air and water, based on our best understanding of what is safe, so who decides whether and when to issue them is really important. Snyder signed off on the legislation. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer later dissolved them.

The sponsor of the bills, a former Upper Peninsula lawmaker, offered Matheny what he surely intended as a condemnation of the MDEQ: “It’s not rules and laws they are following; it’s an agenda. They’re going to save the planet, no matter what.”

‘Very problematic’

“Almost all governments have agencies that specialize in economic development, and then they have environmental regulators,” said James Clift, until last month deputy director of Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (that’s how MDEQ was reconfigured by Whitmer, who also got the department’s mission back on track). “You think, if we have another agency doing economic development, why are environmental regulators also doing it?”

Environmental agencies simply aren’t staffed to police the industries they regulate, Clift said, and largely rely on voluntary compliance: “If you look at it as trying to help companies stay in compliance with environmental laws, then that’s a natural fit for environmental regulators.”

But, Clift said, “When you couple it with deregulation, saying you are basically not going to regulate and protect the environment and public health and instead just going to look at economic development, it’s very problematic. You’re just going to roll back 50-plus years of environmental regulation, under the idea of helping business.”

In Flint, lead leached from service lines into the city’s drinking water because the state didn’t require treatment of the water to prevent that from happening. Lead is a neurotoxin; no amount is safe to consume. For years after, activists and scientists pushed for changes to the federal Lead and Copper Rule that regulates how much of those metals is safe in drinking water. Those changes finally went into effect last fall.

I wonder how long they will last.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact:nkaffer@freepress.com. Submit a letter to the editor atfreep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print.