The Trump administration doesn’t think your health is worth anything, at least not when it comes to calculating how much pollution companies can spew into the air. The Environmental Protection Agency is getting ready to change how it calculates the dangers—and the cost—of fine particulate matter from burning fossil fuels, a change that will miraculously reduce the number of deaths expected from the Trump EPA’s loosening of air pollution and climate change regulations.
The switch from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy plan was forecast to lead to 1,400 additional premature deaths per year. But by refusing to include calculations of the health damage done by fine particulate matter under an average of 12 micrograms per cubic meter, the administration can erase those deaths—not the actual loss of life, but having the deaths attributed to the dirty air and weak regulations.
The former chemical and fossil fuel industry lobbyist currently in charge of air quality at the EPA says that it “doesn’t make any sense” to use the current way of calculating the risks and costs, which is based on a decade of peer-reviewed research.
At the same time, the EPA is turning over enforcement responsibility for things like coal ash dumps to states that ask for that responsibility. And when Oklahoma asks to be in charge of enforcement on a giant ash dump, your first thought should not be “Wow, I bet they’re going to come down on that pollution like a ton of bricks.”