WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity filed a Freedom of Information Act request today seeking more information on a Trump administration plan to let polluters ignore rules limiting emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency this week invited coal plants and other industrial polluters to email requests to ignore nine Clean Air Act rules, including limits on toxic pollutants like mercury and cancer-causing ethylene oxide. Exposure to mercury can cause brain damage in children.

“This is the email inbox from hell, where vital protections for the air we breathe go to die,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “It’s truly dystopic for the Trump administration to allow polluters to unleash more brain-damaging toxins on our kids just by sending an email. Letting the greediest polluters click their way to causing more birth defects and heart disease takes the cake even in an administration already known for its wanton cruelty.”

The EPA’s posting provided a template, including a subject line, for companies to use to get approvals, with few specific criteria or conditions for the exemptions. Companies apparently need only to claim that the technology to curb the pollutant isn’t available and that an exemption would somehow serve vague “national security interests,” without any specified requirement to provide evidence. Then President Trump himself will apparently decide whether to bypass the Clean Air Act and give the thumbs up to pollute.

The Center’s FOIA request seeks each complete application and purported justification for these presidential exemptions under the law.

“Any company that asks Trump for permission to emit more pollutants that damage babies’ brains will stain its own reputation beyond repair,” Rylander said. “We will get every scrap of information the federal government has on this disgusting outrage, and we will hold each company accountable for the horrific damage it will cause to human health and the climate.”