Public health experts and environmental justice advocates have been calling for years for the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten its standards on soot, a deadly air pollutant that has been associated with higher COVID-19 death rates.
But the Trump administration kept its brand strong on Monday, rejecting the tougher regulations, which will keep thresholds for fine particle pollution at the same level for the next five years, reports The Washington Post:
The agency retained the current thresholds for fine particle pollution for another five years, despite mounting evidence linking air pollution with illness and death. In its decision, the EPA maintained that the Obama-era levels, set in 2012, are adequately protective of human health. Agency scientists had recommended lowering the annual particulate matter standard to between 8 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter in a draft report last year, citing estimates that reducing the limit to 9 could save between 9,050 and 34,600 lives a year.
Dominique Browning, co-founder and the head of the advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, told the Post the EPA decision “flies in the face of good science and good public health. It is outrageous.”
While the regulations are in line with the threshold set during the Obama administration, soot—the most widespread of America’s deadly air pollutants—can still cause illness and death at levels below federal air quality standards, reports The Scientific American. A number of studies released since 2012 have also underscored the negative health impacts of air pollution, chronicling the disproportionate harm soot poses to nonwhite communities, in particular.
Soot is emitted a number of ways, from industrial facilities and incinerators to highways, where nonwhite communities are more likely to be situated.
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Models from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that Asian Americans were, on average, more likely to be exposed to soot particulate matter concentrations from vehicle tailpipes, at a rate 34 percent higher than the average rate for all Americans, reports the Scientific American. Black Americans and Latinx were also more likely to be exposed to soot than the “average” American, at 24 percent and 23 percent.
