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文章

2020年3月26日

作者:
Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill

EPA suspends enforcement of environmental laws amid coronavirus

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday, telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak. The temporary policy, for which EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.”

“This EPA statement is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future. It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic. And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was,” [said] Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA’s Office of Enforcement during the Obama administration... "[T]he EPA statement does not even reserve EPA's right to act in the event of an imminent threat to public health."

... The EPA has been under pressure from a number of industries, including the oil industry, to suspend enforcement of a number of environmental regulations due to the pandemic... American Petroleum Institute... asked for a suspension of rules that require repairing leaky equipment as well as monitoring to make sure pollution doesn’t seep into nearby water... The memo says companies should try to minimize “the effects and duration of any noncompliance” with environmental laws, and should also keep records of their own noncompliance, along with identifying how the coronavirus was a factor.

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