Gutting EPA climate rules will put lives at risk
Dr. Vanessa Kerry is CEO of Seed Global Health, World Health Organization special envoy for climate change and health, and director of global climate and health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The Trump administration’s plan to rescind a fundamental scientific declaration about the impact of greenhouse gases will damage efforts to fight climate change and sacrifice American lives and livelihoods to politics and special interests.
The proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency would rescind a 2009 declaration that scientifically established the harmful impact greenhouse gases have on people and the climate. The EPA plans to erase current limits on pollution from cars, factories, and power plants. In doing so, it plans to claim that climate regulations on automakers and other polluting industries harm human health because of higher prices and reduced consumer choice, according to a report by The New York Times. This is not true and is a reversal of fundamental economic and health data that long demonstrated these regulations save lives and help the economy.
Removing the greenhouse gas regulations will increase extreme weather and pollution, which will put lives at risk, hurt the economy, and increase Americans’ health costs by shifting costs to lost productivity and lost income.
The very real impact of extreme weather is hard to miss. Brutal heat is becoming the norm. Take last month, when 130 million people in the United States were under heat warnings, with heat records broken in over 280 locations.
Extreme heat kills. So does extreme rainfall, as seen with tragic consequences in Texas and New Mexico. And our undeniably warming planet is making extreme weather more frequent and dangerous: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates extreme weather is now 65 percent more likely than the average.
Further, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 American lives are cut short each year by air pollution in the actual air we breathe — that’s comparable to gunshot fatalities and road traffic accidents combined.
But beyond the headlines of death and destruction, extreme weather is also having an impact on daily lives. Climate change compromises livelihoods, particularly for the millions who work outdoors. If it’s too hot to harvest a crop or work on a construction site, it will impact workers’ incomes as well as the bottom line for businesses.
Extreme heat causes $100 billion in lost productivity each year across the country. These losses are expected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050.
In the agriculture sector, extreme heat drives up food prices, because there are fewer days when food can be harvested — a recent study found “heatflation” could raise food prices by as much as 3 percent each year over a decade.
Cutting regulation isn’t saving ordinary Americans money; it’s saving big business money. The EPA publicly endorsed this very point in June, declaring that proposed regulation cuts for power plants “would save the power sector $19 billion in regulatory costs over two decades beginning in 2026, or about $1.2 billion a year.”
The sad truth is the administration is abandoning its responsibility to act, and American citizens and people around the globe will pay the price. Denying the incontrovertible truth about climate change risks more death and damage to property and business.
Further, under the guise of deregulation, the administration is strategically undermining the authority of scientists and the public’s access to facts on how greenhouse gas emissions will impact lives and livelihoods.
White House officials will not back down. Instead Congress and state and city officials, as well as courts, must block the plan. Otherwise, we risk deepening misunderstanding with the public, economic damage, more loss of life, and putting our long-term prosperity at risk.
This isn’t giving Americans more choice, it’s stripping them of their right to clean air, safe communities, and a secure job.