President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda will foster affordability, EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi said on Monday during an exclusive event with Breitbart News.
Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney, moderating the conversation, mentioned that there seems to be a significant connection between deregulating energy and bringing down inflation and making affordability a reality.
“Energy touches everything we buy, and when it becomes cheaper, that will just almost mechanically bring down inflation, because it is a big part of the inflation index, but also it will then feed into all the other products,” Carney pointed out, asking how the EPA is thinking about the affordability agenda and “what it can do to solve this problem that still vexes a lot of Americans.”
Fotouhi pointed out that the Biden administration imposed what he described as a “significant amount of additional regulatory burden on energy generation.”
“Whether it’s extraction, oil and gas, whether it’s electric generation, through a slew of additional regulatory requirements, some of which had little to no tie to actual environmental health outcomes,” he pointed out.
“I’ll use the updates that the Biden administration made to the Mercury and Air Toxic standard as an example,” he continued. “We’ve proposed in the last few months, to rescind those updates and to revert back to the rule as it existed in 2020, which the Biden administration agreed fully protects against the health impacts of mercury and other air toxics, but they decided, simply, because they determined there was additional technology available to reduce emissions by a larger degree, that those would now be required, and that imposed a significant amount of additional cost on electric generation at a time when we need more base load,” he said.
The risk, he added, is that consumer electric bills go up.
“So that is just one action that we proposed, but the target of all of what we’re trying to do is address the cost of living for Americans, so that, as you said, energy feeds into costs for so many other goods and services that are purchased,” he said, pointing back to the Trump administration’s goal of focusing on affordability.
“So even if it’s not the consumer’s direct electric bill, it’s the cost of the good and service [or] the good or service that they’re buying that’s influenced by that. It’s the cost of the of the haircut that they’re purchasing from from the barber shop down the street, whatever it is, right? So that is a focus of ours in conjunction with carrying out our statutory obligation,” he added.
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