Detroit (AP) – Congress voted to kill Biden-era rules that require rubber tire makers to clean up planet-warmed emissions from the US manufacturing process
The Environmental Protection Agency established the rubber tire industry, particularly the previously unregulated rubber treatment regulations through amending national emission standards for dangerous air pollutants last November. Tires are made from chemicals, compounds and materials that release greenhouse gases, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds, experts say.
Republican Virginia Sen. Morgan Griffith, alongside Republicans, alongside South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, moved forward through the Congressional Review Act, which allowed Congress to reverse the rules earlier this year, allowing them to reverse the rules of federal agencies. The vote was passed in the House of Representatives on March 5th and in the Senate on Tuesday. This measure will then go to the president’s desk to sign it.
“Like many regulations issued during the decline of the Biden-Harris administration, rubber tire manufacturing emissions standards utilized questionable emissions data and pointed to negligible health benefits as justifications for the regulations,” Griffith said in a statement Tuesday. He said the rules were not helpful for public health.
The EPA regulates other so-called “source categories” such as asbestos and asphalt roof processing, manufacturing, manufacturing, manufacturing, and other chemical production and processes, including asbestos and asphalt roofing treatment, manufacturing, manufacturing, and other chemical production and processes, according to the EPA.
The rubber regulations stemmed from a court’s decision requiring the EPA to address unregulated emissions from source categories in the agency’s technology review, in response to requests for the Clean Air Act. Plaintiffs in the case included the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a nonprofit organization representing communities near historically dirty air. Another case led by the South Carolina-based Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League called the EPA for a lacking source of HAP, saying it had not set rules in a timely manner.
The EPA aims to meet the requirements for clean air acts, and at the time said changes to the rubber rules would reduce total hydrocarbons and filterable particulate matter.
Scott previously said the rule is “a Biden EPA regulation based on questionable data and imposes all contamination prevention that fits a troublesome one-size.”
The industry claims tire factories are needed to install new, costly air pollution control devices that can harm American manufacturing jobs.
The country has major tire manufacturers, including Michelin North America, headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina and headquartered in Akron, Ohio. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The measure marks the latest efforts in this administration to deregulate industries in the name of strengthening American manufacturing. The EPA first said it would rethink national emissions standards for controlling dangerous air pollutants in rubber tire manufacturing and other prominent industries as part of the 31 action deregulation blitz announced on March 12.
In a statement to the Associated Press, the EPA said: “When it comes to law, the EPA will work quickly to withdraw excessively burdensome rules,” he said, and recent efforts by agent manager Lee Zeldin speak specifically with the South Carolina manufacturing industry on such issues.
The American Tire Manufacturers Association said the vote “reduces the financial burden on tire manufacturing facilities.”
“Tire manufacturers have long understood and have adhered to existing standards,” Anne Foristal Luke, president and CEO of the industry group, said in a statement. For the group, the November regulations “create negative environmental impacts, place a significant financial burden on tire manufacturing facilities, and provide negligible benefits, if any.”
But Sen. Sheldon White House, a Democrat from Rhode Island, called it “another attempt in many attempts to unravel human health and protection for the environment” and part of “an endless quest to deal with the nation’s biggest polluters.”
Prior to Tuesday’s vote, the White House said on the Senator’s floor that the resolution would “deny clean air protection for Americans, where still developing lungs and brains are particularly harmful to American children, where the effects of these contaminants are most vulnerable to the effects of these pollutants.”
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Alexa St. John is a climate reporter for the Associated Press. X: Follow her at @Alexa_stjohn. Contact her at ast.john@ap.org.
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