Excellon Mobile has agreed to pay more than three hundred million dollars to resolve air pollution violations tied to eight chemical plants in Texas and Louisiana, one of two environmental settlements with oil companies announced by the Trump administration on Tuesday. The cases are among the most notable environmental enforcement actions by the Trump administration, with at least one target that
hits close to home. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, of course, was chief executive officer at Exxon until late last year. Joining us is Pat Parento, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. Pat Scott Pruett, the head of the e p A, is leading the efforts to roll back Obama era environmental regulations, including the first limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. So does this settlement
surprise you, No, it doesn't surprise me. I'm glad to see the EPA and the Justice Department have reached an agreement with Excellent to correct the violations at these facilities. But it has to be noted that these are cases that have been in the works for quite a long time. Um So, as much as anything, it's the work of the Obama administration that produced this result. I think proved and company deserve credit, uh for continuing with those kinds
of enforcement cases. Hope we see some more, but I don't think i'd overstate yet the commitment to environmental enforcement until we see a little more. Well, Pat, what what is it that Exxon did wrong here that they're now settling. Well, they, like other companies that run these refineries, UH, flare off a lot of the gas, the excess gas, and it includes volatile organic compounds, some of which are quite toxic.
And of course, in Texas, where these refineries are concentrated, UH, there's some pretty severe health consequences to local communities, many of which are low income communities that are suffering from from the pollution from these facilities. So it's a flaring problem. And the controls that Exxon has now committed to spend upwards a three million dollars on are designed to actually
capture these gases rather than flare them off. And of course, some of the gases include methane, which which is actually valuable, so reducing some of the waste by controlling the flaring actually makes some business sense as well. Pat Pruitt is pursuing what he calls up back to basics agenda. He says he'll prior prioritize action on traditional pollutants. What does that mean exactly? Well, this is an example of going
after traditional pollutants. Follloutile organic compounds are ubiquitous through many different industrial sectors. It's, i would say, one of the major air quality problems that we have, along with O zone, fine particulates and others. So there's a real long list of these kinds of conventional pollutants and I hope that Mr Pruitt is is sincere in going after them. And
of course that takes resources. It takes staff. You can just imagine and with eight facilities, that the number of inspections, monitoring, report gathering, analysis that went into these cases. That takes people, boots on the ground, if you will. Pru It has put in a budget that would drastically reduce e p a S on the ground capabilities in the enforcement areas. So uh, you know, once again there's a bit of
inconsistency here. On the one hand, we hear the administrator committing to strong enforcement, but on the other hand, we seem reducing the capability of the agency to actually do that. Well. One other area that I think it's kind of interesting is if you're there's obviously a pushing e p A under under Mr pruittt to avoid taking action against UH carbon you know, in the atmosphere and things that you know,
global warming type things. Um, is there a way for him to steer the agency to only go after traditional pollutants without also looking at carbon issues or can they really be separated out that cleanly? No, they can't be set rated out, either technically or legally, because the Supreme Court has ruled that e p A has a mandatory obligation to regulate carbon from these facilities their oil refineries in the cases that we're talking about, but many others,
power plants, cement plants, and so forth. And unless UH e p A changes it's endangerment finding, and which is very unlikely and would certainly be challenged in court. Um, e p A really doesn't have the discretion not to regulate carbon from these facilities. And of course the Clean Power Plan was designed to shift away from a lot
of the most polluting UH industry power plants. I should say that would have the benefit of reducing a lot of the health effects of more conventional pollutants as well. So by not really regulating and shifting away from coal fired power plants, you're also allowing these other air quality problems to continue. Patent about forty five seconds. But tell us a about the second agreement announced with Denver based PDC Energy. Well, that one involves, uh, a very modest
fine of about two million or so dollars. That's really kind of a token, uh penalty that that will not have a great deterrent effect. Um. And it's done in conjunction with the state of Colorado, so there's some cooperation involved with that, which is a good thing. But but by itself, it's not a major enforcement action. I would say it's not going to have a significant effect on the industry. All right, thanks so much as always. Pat Parento,
professor at Vermont Law School. Coming up on Bloomberg Law and investigation by forty five states and d C into an alleged price fixing conspiracy among makers of generic drugs, now targeting executives at two of the drug makers