Dr. Vijay Limaye is a climate and health scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council Office of Science.
Written by Dr.Vijay Limaye
The EPA has stopped evaluating the lives it saves and has unleashed a deregulatory disaster that harms health.
Over the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly caved to the demands of fossil fuel lobbyists and abandoned its core mission of protecting Americans from deadly pollution of our air, water, and land.
A startling and ironic new development in recent days shows how far the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is willing to completely ignore the harm to our health from soot, smog, and greenhouse gases — focusing instead on what it can do to help polluters.
The Trump EPA took this denial even further by eliminating all greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks and the landmark endangerment finding, a science-based determination that greenhouse gas pollution threatens public health and welfare.
Moreover, buried deep within the explanation of the gas turbine regulations was a startling reversal of what we have been doing for 45 years: quantifying the health costs of suffering caused by air pollution. Instead, future analyzes of the costs and benefits of air pollution control will only consider the costs incurred by industry to clean up its practices, not the actual benefits that clean air brings to humans.
To put it more simply, the EPA is literally saying your life doesn’t count. In fact, neither are the lives and health of the people you care about. Indifference extends from the dead to the living. The EPA no longer takes into account the costly suffering caused by illnesses such as asthma attacks, heart disease, lung cancer, and kidney damage.
One piece of legislation, the Clean Air Act, increased the average life expectancy of Americans by nearly a year and a half and helped prevent more than 350,000 premature deaths each year, making it the most successful public health protection measure in this country’s history. Prevent dangerous pollution from the air we breathe by deploying a science, policy, and enforcement toolbox to monitor, assess, and reduce deadly pollution from coast to coast.
Yes, that’s right. Thanks to one law, we live an average of 17 months longer. The health benefits of removing soot and smog have provided our nation with trillions of dollars in economic benefits.
As a health scientist and former EPA official who works on the health science and data that underpin the Clean Air Act, I know that there is mounting evidence that efforts to clean the air are wise, moral, and highly cost-effective, with benefits outweighing costs by more than 30 times. This is an issue that should not even be discussed.
Unfortunately, when it comes to air pollution, there is much more than meets the eye. Although microscopic soot particles are too small to be seen by us (only a fraction of the size of a grain of sand), they are also the most dangerous form of pollution. That’s because when you inhale them, they can travel deep into your lungs and into your bloodstream. From there, they can travel to any organ in the body and cause significant damage along the way. Soot pollution causes arteriosclerosis, deposits carcinogens in the lungs, and interferes with brain signals.
We are all suffering in some way, and the more we look for evidence of the harm caused by this type of air pollution, the more we find suffering for the young and the old, for pregnant mothers and developing fetuses, for those with chronic illnesses and those without. In recent years, health scientists have implicated soot exposure in a grim list of additional health problems, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, pregnancy complications, and depression.
Dirty air is not only bad for your health, but it also has a negative impact on the economy. In fact, soot costs Medicare, Medicaid, and other taxpayer-supported health programs billions of dollars annually because it severely damages older adults living with heart disease and other illnesses.
This problem remains a serious problem in our country and contributes to at least 50,000 premature deaths each year. This grim statistic is on par with the annual death toll from gun violence and traffic accidents, but is likely an underestimate. That’s because the harms of air pollution are so many that we are only just beginning to understand.
In making these claims, President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has argued that there is too much “uncertainty” about the true societal costs of health problems caused by air pollution, even suggesting that some pollution may be safe to breathe. Indeed, the enormous health damage caused by air pollution has been firmly established by medical experts and economists. The EPA’s decision is Orwellian in its design. Are deaths from pollution so hard to justify giving coal-fired power plants and refineries a free pass to spew soot into the air? Well, just remove the body count from the calculus. Voila! Problem solved.
The Trump EPA has now made its policy clear: It is in the business of protecting polluters, not the public.
And just as it ignores the harms of air pollution, the Trump administration is doing the same with climate change. As millions of Americans face health threats from stronger storms, hotter heat waves, and more dangerous wildfires, the Trump EPA is trying to pretend it’s all a hoax, ignore the human cost, and claim there’s nothing to be done about it. Once again, oil billionaires and coal-fired power plant owners can celebrate on their yachts, but the rest of us will pay the price.
There is still much that divides our country, but poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for curbing the pollution that drastically shortens the lifespans of our children and grandparents.
We all want to breathe clean air and, in fact, it is our legal right to do so. Only when we see through the smoke, stand up for ourselves and everyone we care about, and stop the Trump administration’s toxic policies, will we all be able to breathe a little easier.
Featured image by Getty Images for Unsplash+.
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Vijay Limaye is a climate and health scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Office of Science, where he leads economic evaluation research and advocacy efforts to understand and address the significant health costs of climate change and defend the science behind the Clean Air Act. Prior to joining NRDC, he worked as a scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, focusing on Clean Air Act regulatory enforcement, air quality monitoring policy, and health risk communication. He is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a researcher in the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the Nelson Institute for the Environment.
