For the past couple of years, we’ve been tracking the Trump administration’s Steve Milloy-driven War on PM2.5 pollution science, including the science advisory panel shenanigans regarding the replacement of real experts with flunkies that were hand-picked by polluters. So while we were pleased to see some of the initial proposals got the back burner treatment, that doesn’t mean Trump’s EPA was done finding ways to put polluters first.
By way of quick catch-up: PM2.5 is the name for tiny particles (1/30th the size of a human hair) which have been linked to a number of health issues involving the heart and lungs. Importantly, the science suggests that even the smallest amount of this small pollutant can cause trouble. Because PM2.5 results from burning coal and fossil fuels as well as tobacco, it’s long been a target of deniers like Steve Milloy, who have spent a career seeking out ways to allow industries to continue profiting off of pollution, free from the burdens of public health protections. That’s because the reduction of PM2.5 pollution that comes from shutting down coal plants (or cracking down on second-hand smoke) carries with it enormous health benefits. And even though the EPA formally has a “safe” limit set, reducing PM2.5 levels below that level still provide health benefits.
These are the key co-benefits that deniers in and out of the Trump administration have attacked or ignored, as without the public health savings from cutting out PM2.5, certain regulations don’t seem quite as robust in a cost-benefit analysis.
After Pruitt killed a PM2.5 panel that would have handled this request, Wheeler is now asking for nominees to a new panel to look at how to count the benefits of reducing already-low PM2.5 pollution levels. Unlike existing advisory boards, this one is to be run by outside contractors and therefore not beholden to normal transparency requirements. Wheeler quietly announced the project by a filing in the federal registry. The agency plans to form a panel, publish a report, hold a single peer review meeting, and issue a final report by the fall of 2019.
This is, to put it lightly, a quick turn-around time for such a substantial report.
As NRDC attorney John Walke explained in a Twitter thread that read between the lines in Wheeler’s proposal, the plan appears to be to use the panel “to deny PM2.5-related premature deaths.” Wheeler’s going around the usual advisory bodies (with their pesky transparency and accountability) and rushing the timeline, “raising the prospect of railroading.”
Because it’s obvious that what they’re trying to do is justify their polluter-benefiting policy agenda, and by coming after PM2.5 science, Team Trump is, in Walke’s words, “putting the hearse before the horse, again.”
And again is right. After years of trying to bury the bodies of evidence about the lethality of the Trump agenda, they’ve had plenty of time for re-hearse-al.