DETROIT – Congress has decided to overturn a regulation from the Biden administration, which mandated that manufacturers of rubber tires reduce their production-related emissions that contribute to global warming.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had finalized new guidelines in November, targeting emissions from the rubber tire industry, particularly focusing on previously unregulated aspects of rubber processing. According to experts, the production of tires involves chemicals and materials that emit greenhouse gases, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds.
Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith, along with South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, all Republicans, proposed a resolution to repeal these rules earlier this year. It advanced through the Congressional Review Act, enabling Congress to revoke new federal agency rules with a simple majority vote in both the House and Senate. The House approved the measure on March 5, and the Senate followed suit on Tuesday. The resolution now awaits the president’s decision to be signed into law.
“Like many of the regulations issued during the waning days of the Biden-Harris Administration, the rubber tire manufacturing emission standard utilized questionable emissions data and pointed to negligible health benefits as justification for the rule,” Griffith said in a statement Tuesday. He said the rule did not serve public health.
The standards regulate other so-called “source categories” including asbestos, asphalt roofing processing and manufacturing, dry cleaning, petroleum refineries, other chemical production and processes and more, which — in addition to the environmental concerns — can cause cancer and other serious health problems, according to the EPA.
The rubber rule resulted from a court decision that required the EPA to address unregulated emissions from source categories upon the agency’s technology reviews as required by the Clean Air Act. Plaintiffs in the case included the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a nonprofit organization representing communities located near historically dirty air. Another case, led by the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League based in South Carolina, also called out the EPA for missing sources of HAPs and said it did not set rules in a timely manner.
Aimed at meeting Clean Air Act requirements, the EPA said at the time that the rubber rule changes would cut total hydrocarbons and filterable particulate matter — or solids that can be captured on a filter, known as fPM — emissions by approximately 171 tons per year.
Scott previously said the rule was “a last-minute Biden EPA regulation that was based on questionable data and imposes onerous one-size-fits-all pollution controls.”
Industry stakeholders have argued that tire factories would be required to install costly “regenerative thermal oxidizers,” new air pollution control equipment that destroys HAPs and VOCs, that would increase carbon emissions and, because of the expense, harm American manufacturing jobs.
The nation is home to major tire makers including Michelin North America, headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, and Goodyear, in Akron, Ohio. The two companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The measure marks the latest of this administration’s efforts to deregulate industry in the name of bolstering American manufacturing. The EPA first said it would reconsider National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants regulations for rubber tire manufacturing and other notable industries as part of a 31-action deregulation blitz announced on March 12. Republicans have generally been using the Congressional Review Act to wage an assault on the previous administration’s many efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In a statement to The Associated Press, the EPA said: “Once a law, EPA will work expeditiously to rescind the overly burdensome rule,” noting agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s recent efforts speaking specifically with the South Carolina manufacturing industry on issues such as this one.
The U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association said the vote “reduces financial burdens on tire manufacturing facilities.”
“Tire manufacturers have long understood and complied with” existing standards, Anne Forristall Luke, president and CEO of the industry group said in a statement. To the group, the November rule “creates an adverse environmental impact, while imposing significant financial burdens on tire manufacturing facilities and providing negligible, if any, benefits.”
But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, called the measure “yet another of many attempts to unravel protections for human health and the environment” and part of an “endless quest to accommodate the countries’ biggest polluters.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Whitehouse said on the Senate floor that the resolution “would deny clean air protections to the American people with particular harm to American children whose lungs and brains, still developing, are most vulnerable to the effects of these pollutants.”
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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment.
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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.
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