The Environmental Protection Agency, under the auspices of the Trump administration and the current conservative project, has decided that protecting the environment is no longer a priority. First the EPA decided that greenhouse gases no longer posed any harm to human beings, and now it’s gone one step further: Deciding that harm to human beings is actually not even worth considering at all, according to the New York Times.
The Times got a hold of internal emails and documents from the EPA, which point to a reorganization of priorities at the agency. Rather than considering the human cost of emissions — asthma cases, particulate inhalation, death, that sort of thing — the agency will now consider the economic cost to manufacturers of emissions regulations. It’s a complete reversal of the agency’s entire founding purpose, one that undercuts 55 years of work to actually protect the only planet we know to be habitable
This is, in a word, bad
Folks in the business world love to talk about something called a cost-benefit analysis, where the costs of making a change are weighed against the benefit it will bring. The EPA has long worked along a similar principle, comparing the costs of its regulations to the benefit for people breathing air (notably all people). If the organization is now omitting the latter half of that equation, then it’s solely weighing the downsides and never looking at anything that would support new regulations — or even existing regulations, should the administration make good on its promises to get rid of prior tailpipe tests. What else should we expect from the presidency that rolled back CAFE regulations?
The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to slash any and all regulations that stand between its corporate friends and their potential profits — that’s the peak of the free market, you see, when the government intervenes to favor some companies over others. Stripping environmental regulations promises short-term profits at the expense of long-term safety, as well as long-term competitiveness on a global scale. This is a shortsighted, indefensible move.
