Over the past decade, the United State’s government has made changes regarding environmental policies such as reducing fossil fuel emissions, regulating pollution, or funding boards that aim to conserve and protect the environment. Since the Trump Administration has been in office, there have been some changes regarding US environmental policies that are worth noting, because the preservation of the planet is pretty important! Here are some of the most recent changes that have been made:

September 18th, 2018

The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency announced rollbacks to policies put in place for reducing requirements on oil and gas companies and the regulation of methane in their operations. The administration claimed that the previous Obama-era rules were too strict and needed to be removed in order for the companies to function. There has been criticism since this decision to put the previous regulations back in place, but also praise claiming that it needed to be done.

August 21st, 2018

Trump implemented the Affordable Clean Energy Rule to change the regulation of coal plants to being regulated by individual states rather than the national government. This act nullifies the Obama Administration regulations put in place in hopes of reducing the emissions from coal plants. With this new act, states will have the ability to decide how much or little their coal plants can be regulated. States in which coal plants are a large part of the economy such as West Virginia, will loosen the regulations in order to promote the growth of the businesses, while states such as California will probably have stricter regulations.

August 2nd, 2018

The president and his administration made the announcement to go against the previous made policy regarding the limiting of emission from cars. The original plan that the Obama administration implemented aimed to require that light cars produced after 2012 be twice as more fuel efficient by 2025, hoping to have cars with 54 mpg. This announcement did not bag the entire plan as a whole, but rather modified the end goal of the fuel efficiency to be 34 mpg by 2021. This modification to the previously made policy of fuel efficiency only reduces the end goal slightly.

July 30th, 2018

Back in 2015, 21 kids from the nonprofit, The Children’s Trust, filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming they it has failed to protect the planet, and because of that, its people. The children state that the lack of efforts to fight climate change and pollution has ultimately denied their rights of life, liberty, and property. The Obama Administration and the Trump Administration both made efforts to dismiss the case because of their claim of it being too premature, but the Supreme Court rejected both of the efforts of the past and current presidency. Named Juliana v United States, this trial’s court date was announced to take place on October 29th in Eugene, Oregon.