Air Quality Policy Shifts and Health Risk

The EPA stopped valuing the lives it could save​​, setting up a deregulatory disaster that will be hazardous to your health. 

For the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has bowed time and time again to the demands of fossil fuel lobbyists, abandoning its core mission to protect Americans from deadly pollution in our air, water, and land.

Stunning and cynical new developments in recent days demonstrate just how far the Trump’s administration’s EPA is willing to go to just plain ignore the harms from soot, smog and greenhouse gases on our health — as it focuses instead on what it can do to help polluters.

The Trump EPA took that denial a giant step further by repealing all greenhouse-gas standards for cars and trucks and the landmark endangerment finding, which is a science-based determination that greenhouse gas pollution threatens public health and welfare.

In addition, buried deep in its explanation for a rule on gas turbines was a stunning reversal of something it had been doing for 45 years: quantifying the health costs of suffering caused by air pollution. Instead, in its future analyses of the costs and benefits of air pollution controls, it will only consider the costs incurred by industry for cleaning up their act – not the very real human benefits of clean air.

In simpler terms: EPA is saying that your life literally doesn’t count. Nor, in fact, does the life – or health – of anyone you care about. The indifference extends from the dead to the living: EPA will no longer account for the costly suffering caused by illnesses like asthma attacks, heart disease, lung cancer or kidney damage.

One law – the Clean Air Act – has added nearly a year and a half to the average American lifespan and helps prevent more than 350,000 early deaths each year, making it the most successful public health safeguard in our nation’s history. It keeps dangerous pollution out of the air we breathe by deploying a toolbox of science, policy, and enforcement to monitor, evaluate, and cut lethal pollution from coast to coast.

Yes, that’s right: Our lives will be, on average, 17 months longer all because of one law. The health gains from cleaning up soot and smog have delivered trillions of dollars in economic benefits to our nation.

As a health scientist and former EPA staffer working on the health science and data that underpin the Clean Air Act, I know that there is mountains of evidence confirming that efforts to clean up our air are sensible, moral, and hugely cost-effective, with the benefits outweighing costs by a factor of more than thirty to one. This is an issue that shouldn’t even be up for debate.

When it comes to air pollution, there’s unfortunately far more than reaches the eye. Microscopic soot particles are too small for us to see (just a fraction of a grain of sand in size), but they’re also the most dangerous form of pollution. That’s because if we inhale them, they can reach deep into our lungs and enter our bloodstream. From there, they can travel to every organ in the body, inflicting grave damage on their way. Soot pollution causes our arteries to harden, deposits carcinogens in our lungs, and interferes with our brain signals.

We’re all in harm’s way, and the more we look for evidence of harm from this type of air pollution, the more suffering we find– in the young and the old, in expecting mothers and the developing fetus, in those living with chronic disease, and those not. In just the past few years, health scientists have implicated soot exposures in a grim list of additional health problems like diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, pregnancy complications, and depression.

Dirty air is not just bad for our health, it’s bad for our economy. Indeed, because soot so gravely injures older people living with heart disease and other illnesses, it costs Medicare, Medicaid, and other taxpayer-supported health programs billions of dollars a year.

This issue remains a serious problem in our country, contributing to at least 50,000 early deaths each year. While that grim statistic is on par with the annual death tolls from gun violence or traffic accidents, it’s likely an underestimate. That’s because there are so many harms of air pollution that we’re still just beginning to understand.

In making these claims, Trump’s EPA argues that there is too much “uncertainty” about the true societal costs of the health problems caused by air pollution, and even suggests that some level of pollution may be safe to breathe. In truth, the substantial health costs of air pollution are firmly established by medical experts and economists. The EPA’s decision is Orwellian in its design: Are deaths from pollution making it hard to justify giving a coal plant or refinery a free pass to spew soot into the air? Well, simply remove the body count from your calculus. Voila! Problem solved.

The Trump EPA has now made its policy crystal clear: It is in the business of protecting polluters, not the public.

And just as it is ignoring the harms of air pollution, the Trump administration is doing the same thing with climate change. With millions of Americans facing 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 its human costs, and claim there’s nothing to be done about it. Once again, oil billionaires and coal plant owners can celebrate on their yachts, but the rest of us will pay the price.

There’s much that still divides our country, but poll after poll shows that there is  overwhelming public support for curtailing the pollution that significantly shortens the lifespans of our kids 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 that we care about, and halt the Trump administration’s poisonous agenda will we all be able to breathe a little easier.

https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/03/chokehold-the-trump-administrations-stealth-plan/