To paraphrase a line from conservationist Randy Newberg on a recent podcast, "We benefit from the riches and sacrifices of those who came before us." We benefit thanks to those who stood up, who paid the price, and who sought to ensure their children and children's children had clean air and clean water. And I'm hugely glad they did.
The riches they delivered are all around us in the clean air we breathe and the water we drink.
But because the vast majority of folks aren't student of history, or are those who actively distrust their history books, they don't remember rivers and lakes on fire. They don't know about the smog-choked cities of yesteryear. How you couldn't leave your house. How you couldn't drink your tap water. How pollution, both in the water and the air and the ground, killed countless Americans. They don't remember a time before the Environmental Protection Agency doing the good work in regulating business and manufacturers, and curbing the damage that pollution does to our homes and lives.
And it shows they don't remember those truly bad times, or that they don't care we return to them, as the current Trump Administration's EPA is gutting itself from the inside, and we're about to have another era of not being able to go outside, not being able to go for a ride, and not being able to drink our waters. At least, if manufacturers scramble and chase dirtier mechanisms and machines.
I'm hopeful they won't, as changing course now after decades of progress seems like bad business. That said, the current EPA certainly doesn't care about your health and well-being, as it recently stated it doesn't care if you die from pollution, because your health is less important than a business's harm from regulation.
The EPA change in question revolves around PM2.5, which is fine particulate matter that's less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, and which can cause a whole vast array of issues within the human body.
According to the California Air Resource Board (CARB), which is the state's own version of the EPA but with way stricter rules and regulations, "A number of adverse health impacts have been associated with exposure to both PM2.5 and PM10. For PM2.5, short-term exposures (up to 24-hours duration) have been associated with premature mortality, increased hospital admissions for heart or lung causes, acute and chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks, emergency room visits, respiratory symptoms, and restricted activity days. These adverse health effects have been reported primarily in infants, children, and older adults with preexisting heart or lung diseases."
The agency adds, "Long-term (months to years) exposure to PM2.5 has been linked to premature death, particularly in people who have chronic heart or lung diseases, and reduced lung function growth in children."
Trump's EPA, however, feels that the rules around mitigating PM2.5 exposure, along with other rules and regulations that help curb greenhouse gasses and other pollutants, are too onerous for major corporations and their ever-increasing profits and CEO pay. According to a letter obtained by The New York Times, an EPA supervisor relayed the new guide post for the agency to his direct subordinates, stating, "historically, the E.P.A.’s analytical practices often provided the public with false precision and confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone," adding, "to rectify this error, the E.P.A. is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone."
What that all breaks down to is that the EPA won't state the health benefits of reducing and curbing PM2.5 pollution, or how it impacts folks' everyday lives. A drastic shift in pollution policy, and one that tells us exactly where the EPA under the Trump administration is going, especially if you consider the moves the Secretary of the Interior, along with his cronies in the Senate, have pushed for in terms of mining and extraction industries going into wildlife refuges, selling off public lands to oil and gas companies, and killing environmental reviews or public input on public land leases.
Speaking to The Times, Carolyn Holran, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, told the paper, "The E.P.A., like the agency always has, is still considering the impacts that PM2.5 and ozone emissions have on human health. Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact." That, however, is horseshit and we all know it.
But here's where I'm hopeful, and why you should be too.
Legacy manufacturers and corporations, the likes of Kawasaki, Honda, Harley-Davidson, Ford, Coca-Cola, and others, have spent billions renovating and retrofitting their processes in order to comply with the EPA in the past. These corporations have spent billions on ensuring they're following the rules and regulations so they don't get screwed over by the feds. They still get fined and found to have circumvented the laws from time to time, and they all still pollute. But they're all way better than they used to and going back to those old ways of reducing and curbing pollution would mean massive hits to their businesses and corporate profits. It's why Exxon won't jump into the Venezuelan oil market, as it's just not profitable for them. And it's why though EV mandates are dead, the powersports world is still bringing them to market and giving consumers the option.
Where we should be concerned, however, is in new corporations and companies, as well as those that want more data centers. More and more are being proposed all across the United States, including in supposedly federally protected areas like Minnesota's Boundary Waters. These companies don't care or haven't been subjected to the environmental rules that govern everyone else, so they see these rules as too onerous to their bottom line, which is why they're the ones pushing the Trump Administration to do away with them.
Damn, the folks downstream!
What we can do is continue to fight back, continue to voice our opinions to our local, state, and federal representatives, as common folks have shown they can push back against these companies' wants and wishes and lack of care for what happens to those around them. And we can continue to voice our opinions with our checkbooks to those manufacturers that are putting in the work to ensure we're not breathing trash air or swimming in polluted and on fire waterways. By doing that, we'll win.
