A letter released this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association gives a preliminary accounting of Donald Trump’s environmental policy. And the butcher’s bill for Trump’s actions are horrifying.
Repealing the Clean Power Plan can be expected to lead to the deaths of 36,000 Americans and to generate 630,000 cases of childhood respiratory illness over the next decade. Dropping the CAFE standards brings another 5,500 deaths and another 144,000 sick children. And those are not even the biggest impacts. Easily overlooked changes in the rules for diesel trucks allow previously non-compliant, high-pollution vehicles to take to the roads. Those “glider” vehicles mean another 41,000 premature deaths and 900,000 illnesses.
Add it all up, and the tab comes to over 80,000 Americans dying and over a million American children growing up with respiratory illness from pollution that is directly traceable to decisions made by Donald Trump and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. That puts the toll from the decisions Trump and Pruitt have made just one year, on just one topic, well above all the Americans who died in Vietnam.
And as the letter points out, that’s only the beginning. Trump’s actions—from pulling out of the Paris agreement to tariffs on solar panels—will drive the sulfur dioxide that creates acid rain, increase nitrogen oxides in the air we breathe, spread more mercury into the seas, and bring an unknown toll on human health and the environment.
The 80,000 total—actually 82,000 and then some—only accounts for deaths related to changes in air policy since Trump took office. It doesn’t include any affects from changes that have come from allowing mines to dump waste into streams and rivers used for drinking water, bypassing the EPA advisory board to keep dangerous pesticides on the market, or removing protections for wetlands that help to protect the quality of water Americans drink.
The study also does not estimate the effect of Trump’s policies outside US borders. Trump’s effects on the air and water don’t stop at a line on the map. Not even if there’s a wall.
The study recognizes that the constant war on science in the Trump White House—one that includes forcing agencies to hide information from the public, delaying the publication of reports, and removing scientists from advisory boards—is part of a deliberate effort to make it easier to take harmful action without proper scrutiny. By demeaning science and scientists, their work is more easily ignored.
One might imagine that the science that supported enactment of these rules would make repealing them difficult. But that is not the case. Even as it is targeting environmental rules, the Trump administration is taking aim at the use of science that supports public policy.
Just as Trump has attempted to demean reports from news organizations and seed false statements in all forms of media, the effort to diminish science is part of a more general, longer-term battle from the right to de-legitimize every source, bringing every statement down to the level of opinion. When years of expertise and thousands of hours of research can be dismissed as no more valid than a tweet … there’s no longer any reason to respect science or to listen to researchers, or to value their opinion above that of a lobbyist or manufacturer.
The impact of Trump / Pruitt policies is expected to be felt most by the “poor, black, and elderly” based on both living conditions and medical access. But there is also a regional impact.
People working with chemicals in industrial settings will also be affected, as will people who live in areas with high concentrations of power plants such as the Ohio River Valley from Indiana to Pennsylvania, and in the southeast from Alabama and Georgia to Maryland.
Some of the areas that are most supportive of Donald Trump will pay for that support by literally laying down their lives for his policies. Which may seem appropriate, but will not help the million children saddled with illness that dogs them throughout their lives, or the thousands of Americans who die even though they didn’t volunteer their lives to support Trump’s actions.
During his lies-on-every-subject ramble around the White House lawn on Friday, Donald Trump responded to a reporter’s question about EPA policy by claiming that the air was actually better now than it was two years ago. Trump offered absolutely no support for this idea. It’s a statement that Trump has made several times, and one that has largely gone unchallenged by the media. It’s also demonstrably wrong.
The letter in JAMA was authored by researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Kennedy School of government.