Trump EPA appointees want more air pollution — that’s a very bad idea

Climate change garners most of the headlines, but the Trump administration is pushing a much larger and broader pro-pollution agenda whose latest manifestation is a push at the EPA to overturn a long-established scientific consensus that fine particulate pollution (colloquially “soot”) kills people.

This is critically important for two main reasons.

One is that for decades the EPA has been regulating various sources of particulate emissions and the science around how harmful they are plays a role in driving how strict those regulations become. The other is that particulate emissions play a key role in the bureaucratic politics of climate change.

Because carbon dioxide emissions are global and the consequences of climate change are also global, it is generally hard to demonstrate that cutting a given source of greenhouse gas emissions will have large benefits to Americans. But most regulations that reduce carbon emissions also reduce much more localized soot — and taking into account the fact that soot has a marked tendency to kill people who live nearby the emissions sources is important to making the cost-benefit analysis math work.

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