Trump’s EPA Is Using This Sneaky Tactic to Let Nasty Industries Foul Our Air
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Recently, millions of Americans have faced orange skies and air-quality alerts. The struggles many people had with the smoke are a sad reminder of the importance air quality has for our health. Yet the Trump administration has done everything in its […]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been employing a covert strategy during the Trump administration to weaken clean-air standards, as reported by Slate. The administration's "shock and awe" approach to environmental deregulation, which was adopted during the first year of this term, aimed to erase climate policies. The EPA claimed that climate change was not a serious issue, citing a report by hand-picked climate skeptics.
After abandoning its reliance on this report, the agency began to argue that the benefits of reducing air pollution are too uncertain to quantify or value in regulatory decision-making, affecting all pollutants, not just greenhouse gases. This shift in approach, which was announced in January, means that the EPA will no longer assign a dollar value to the health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter and ozone, two major air pollutants.
This move disregards the health concerns that the EPA was established to address. The EPA's new approach, which lacks scientific analysis and citation to studies, assigns no value to the lives saved or diseases and hospitalizations averted due to reduced air pollution. This approach is illegal as it involves putting a thumb on the scale by considering costs but not benefits.
The EPA has also ignored the benefits of reducing other pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, as well as greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons. The agency's cost analysis is also criticized for relying on disputed industry claims without empirical evidence.
Written by urgent.news from Mother Jones's reporting — not their text. Machine-written; read the original for the full account.
