Last year, 7 million people around the world, 600,00 of them children, died from a slow-moving, silent and largely invisible killer: air pollution. In the U.S. alone, that number was 135,000 people, roughly the population of Dayton, Ohio. Poor air quality also accrues an economic cost of about $800 billion each year. And of course pollutants get trapped in the atmosphere, causing global heating and climate change that threatens to upend all life on the planet. Critics are now warning that deregulation at the federal level threatens to make this issue even worse.
One of President Donald Trump’s very first acts in his second term was to repeal long-established environmental protections aimed at protecting public health and mitigating climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to roll back the “endangerment finding,” which allowed the organization to regulate motor vehicle greenhouse gas emissions has drawn outrage from a panoply of parties. On March 19, 24 Democratic-majority states, plus D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and 12 cities and counties filed a lawsuit against the EPA, joining nearly 20 other organizations.
