The increase might be due to overly lax policies from both Trump and Obama.
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| © Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images A woman in San Francisco wears a face mask amid large-scale pollution in the city in October 2017. |
Air pollution is killing more people during the Trump administration
than it was under President Obama. Air pollution was responsible for 9,700 more deaths in 2018 than it was in 2016, according to a new paper by economists at Carnegie Mellon.
The researchers, Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller, argue that some of
the increase is due to non-regulatory factors, like an increase in
wildfires and economic growth. But they note a decline in Clean Air Act
enforcement under Donald Trump that could be responsible as well.
The Trump administration has so far rolled back 24 different regulations and accords related to air pollution, according to a New York Times analysis, including rules around air pollution from refineries, industrial pollution of 189 different substances, and regulation of “haze” in national parks.
But the specific kind of pollution addressed in the new study is what
experts call PM2.5: microscopic particles 2.5 micrometers or less wide
(a small fraction of the diameter of a human hair) arising from human
industry, including coal mining and burning, gasoline combustion,
construction dust, etc.
PM2.5 can kill people in a number of ways:
by causing “heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, chronic lung
disease, and respiratory infections,” to name a few listed in a recent report from the Health Effects Institute and the Global Burden of Disease project. That report estimates that PM2.5 killed about 4.1 million people in 2016 alone through those mechanisms. (Undark also had an excellent in-depth series on PM2.5 last year if you want to learn more.)
In
the new paper, Clay and Muller analyze monitoring data collected daily
as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality System in
653 US counties. Because the collections were daily, that dataset is
quite rich: 1.8 million different readings from 2009 to 2018. Overall,
that dataset shows that from 2009 to 2016, PM2.5 pollution declined by
24.2 percent. This was a fairly steady decline, too: After holding
mostly still from 2009 to 2011, pollution declined noticeably each year
from 2011 through 2016.
Counties with air pollution monitors used in the new study.
But
between 2016 and 2018, PM2.5 pollution rebounded, growing by 5.5
percent. The authors look into three potential causes of the increase:
economic growth, wildfires, and a decline in enforcement activity.
Many
PM2.5 pollutants — like nitrate, sulfate, and elemental carbon — are
primarily emitted by power plants, vehicles, and industrial facilties;
during economic booms, those facilities are used more and produce more
emissions, which could account for the increase from 2016 to 2018.
The
study finds that sulfur emissions, which are associated with coal
plants, continued to decline from 2016 to 2018, while nitrate and
elemental carbon increased. “The chemical composition of particulates
point to increased use of natural gas and to vehicle miles traveled as
likely contributors to the increase,” the authors conclude. Natural gas
consumption likely accounts for a good share of the nitrate increase,
and diesel fuel consumption for the elemental carbon increase.
Wildfires
of the kind that have been increasing in regularity in California and
the Western US recently can also cause large-scale PM2.5 emissions. But
Clay and Muller argue that these wildfires could not on their own
account for the pattern of pollution falling and then increasing; if you
exclude wildfire season (June to September) in the West, Midwest, and
California, and exclude November 2018 in California when two major wildfires occurred, the same pattern remains.
That
leaves the third potential cause the paper investigates: a decline in
enforcement, as measured by EPA penalties imposed for violations of
section 113d of the Clean Air Act. More than 3,000 measures under the
section have occurred since 2009, making it the most common enforcement
action involving the Clean Air Act that results in an actual fine or
penalty.
The decline in enforcement actions doesn’t fully match
the decline and then rise in emissions. The decline in enforcement
begins in 2013, and in 2012 for counties that have not met national air
quality standards. That suggests that insofar as a decline in
enforcement led, after a few years, to an increase in actual pollution,
this is not solely the result of the Trump administration’s actions but
of overly lax enforcement by the Obama administration as well.
That said, there’s no question the Trump administration has been trying to make it easier to emit PM2.5 pollution. As Vox’s Umair Irfan reported
last year, the Trump EPA has been cracking down on the use of
reductions of PM2.5 as a “cobenefit” in justifying regulations meant to
reduce other kinds of emissions. That, in practice, means fewer
restraints on PM2.5 emissions.
This is despite the fact that there’s a large and growing body of research
implicating fine particle pollution in everything from lower school
test scores to lower work productivity to deaths (particularly in the
elderly). Just in 2019 alone, studies have come out associating
particulate pollution with violent crime, lower GDP, childhood stunting in India, and increased mortality.
We
have decades of experience preventing this kind of pollution through
regulatory action, and the emerging evidence base suggests that doing so
could save lives, prevent crime, and grow the economy.
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