US EPA will not rewrite airplane emissions rules finalized under Trump

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Monday it will not rewrite the first-ever standards regulating greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes finalized in the last days of former President Donald Trump's administration. President Joe Biden had directed the EPA in January to consider whether to rewrite the airplane emissions rules, which face a legal challenge from 12 states and three environmental groups that say the rules do not go far enough. Instead, the Biden administration said on Monday, it will press for ambitious new international emissions standards at the upcoming round of international negotiations in February at the UN ICAO. Joe Goffman, the acting head of the EPA Air and Radiation office, said Monday, that it was important to work with the international community and to move quickly on the next round of emissions talks. "We could have really achieved a Pyrrhic victory by tightening the rule and then finding the aviation industry avoided complying by certifying their engines via other governments," Goffman said. Liz Jones, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued, said "the Biden administration has taken climate hypocrisy and delay to new heights.... The EPA twiddled its thumbs for nine months before deciding it would rather defend a do-nothing rule than set any meaningful limits on aircraft emissions." The states said in February the regulation's greenhouse gas emission standards "by EPA’s own analysis, will fail to reduce the emissions of any aircraft, and will prompt no action at all by manufacturers to reduce aircraft emissions." They argue the EPA should have considered that "minority and low-income communities are disproportionately located near airports and exposed to greater criteria and hazardous air pollutants from aircraft takeoff and landing emissions, which more stringent greenhouse gas emission standards could have reduced."<br/>