The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been in a frenzy lately to revise or rollback existing rules that protect our health. Jeff Tollefson writes in Nature about 5 major actions the EPA is taking now that not only harm health, but could hamstring the agency in the future and prevent it from protecting our health in years to come..
The actions:
1-2. Rolling back vehicle emissions and revising the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule. Both of these protective actions are from 2012. In these rollbacks, EPA changes how it counts cost savings and health benefits from the rule, and makes it harder in the future to include health benefits when EPA takes new actions to protect us.
3. Not acting on particulate air pollution (PM2.5). EPA disbanded its Particulate Matter Review Panel, and then proceeded to ignore the recommendations of its own scientists, and decided not to strengthen the PM2.5 standard even though numerous studies in the last 10 years show how dangerous PM2.5 is to our health: making us more susceptible to viral infections, damaging lung growth in children and teens, causing heart attacks, strokes, cancer and lung disease in adults, and much more.
4. Proposing a new rule EPA calls “Transparency in Science” which would require that all studies that EPA uses have data that is publicly available. But studies of people’s health always involve confidentiality agreements with the people in the studies, to protect their privacy. So this proposal would block EPA from using almost all studies involving health. EPA is supposed to be protecting our health, and this rule would prevent that.
5. Revising the guidance EPA uses to interpret NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act. The revisions would exclude health effects that are indirect, cumulative, or remote in time or place from the release. This is how almost all environmental exposures work: air pollution drifts tens or hundreds of miles, viral infections occur a week or more after exposure to air pollution, climate change occurs years from a release. It takes long term exposure over many years for most environmental exposures to damage our health. This proposal would hamstring EPA from acting to protect us from air pollution or climate change.
It is baffling why EPA, an agency charged with protecting health as its main mission, is taking these actions that harm health now, and will prevent EPA from protecting health in the future.
We are in the midst of a national health crisis now from coronavirus, and yet EPA is in a frenzy to rollback standards. These rollbacks not only harm our health, but make us more susceptible to coronavirus.
