Push in the EPA to Relax Particulate Emmissions Constraints
3.31.19
To start off this matter the Trump administration is yet again ignoring science and pushing the EPA to overturn a long established scientific consensus that fine particulate pollution...soot...kills people
. If we were to take out the cost of human lives in pollution emissions, the balance of the pros and cons wouldn't work anymore. This, at a first glance seems trivial to solve, and surprisingly it is! We know that pollution hurts the global economy in the long run, and the only reason to relax standards in the greed of a choice few to line their pockets in the present. Climate change deniers use tactics that involve the every day person cutting off their lights for a certain amount of time or another equally small and unimportant contribution to our collective carbon footprint. What this administration wants the public to forget is that we have the names and locations of the top 100 people killing the planet
. Not as a sleight to the chemical industry (I'm a chemical engineering undergraduate junior who will for sure be applying for your sustainability departments in the future), but there is a major problem with the way that we are trying to just meet the bare minimum to not kill the planet. This one and only planet we know, that we (not so trivially) live on!
This push has backing from an industry consultant who wants the data to have more rigor applied to it, but this is quickly shut down by a biostatician, Francesca Dominici, who points out that you cannot ethically get randomized control trials. This makes sense considering that these are data points from real people, and we cannot subject them to pollutants with the same rigor that we can test other effects on populations. This is a technique to undermine the scientific community to squeeze a couple more dollars out of the people in the communities surrounding industry giants. These fine particulates, PM2.5 affect people from all different walks of life. From test-taking school children, to stock traders, to pear packing factory workers, no one is exempt from the negative effects of high levels of particulates in the atmosphere. Even current studies show that we're already unregulating air pollution, so to further deregulate it to me seems to be a very blatent mistake.
The EPA under Trump already dissolved the 20 person Particulate Matter Review Panel, and now the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee is tasked with the extra work of deciding how much air pollution our population can safely breathe. It's interesting on a personal note that these people most likely are living lives unaffected by air pollution. One of my family members with COPD even within some of the Good
AQI days says that she can notice a difference in the air quality, and when my asthma is worse I can too. Hopefully it doesn't get to the point where we're wearing respirators before we can all agree that PM2.5 particulates in the concentrations we produce are not good for our health.