A Breath of Bad Air: Cost of the Trump Environmental Agenda May Lead to 80K Extra Deaths per Decade [View all]

[DonViejo]

June 12, 2018
David Cutler, PhD1; Francesca Dominici, PhD2

JAMA. 2018;319(22):2261-2262. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.7351

President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe—you cannot breathe.”

As has become apparent, however, it is the changes Trump is proposing that are likely to make breathing more difficult. A central feature of his agenda is environmental damage: making the air dirtier and exposing people to more toxic chemicals. The beneficiaries, in contrast, will be a relatively few well-connected companies.



The Trump Agenda

In pursuit of its wide-ranging environmental agenda, the administration has already reversed or proposed to reverse more than 60 environmental rules. The full extent of the effects on health has not been tabulated and is hard to quantify, but guesses can be made for some of the larger ones (see the Table).

The largest health consequences are likely to come through changes in air quality. The Trump administration has announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule, President Barack Obama’s signature policy on climate change. The rule provides for the EPA to assign each state a goal for limiting emissions from existing power plants and gives the states latitude in meeting those goals, such as switching from coal to natural gas or building new wind or solar farms. Based on the regulatory impact analysis done by the EPA when the rule was implemented (as well as otheranalyses), repealing the rule would lead to an estimated 36 000 deaths each decade and nearly 630 000 cases of respiratory infection in children alone.

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