Shitstain's EPA Denies Need To Tighten Particulate Pollultion Rules, Despite Pollution-COVID Link
WASHINGTON — Disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates, the Trump administration declined on Tuesday to tighten a regulation on industrial soot emissions that came up for review ahead of the coronavirus pandemic.
Andrew R. Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his agency will not impose stricter controls on the tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, a regulatory action that has been in the works for months. The scientific evidence, he said, was insufficient to merit tightening the current emissions standard.
“We believe the current standard is protective of public health,” Mr. Wheeler said in a telephone call with reporters Tuesday morning. “Through the 5-year review process we’ve identified a lot of uncertainties. Through those uncertainties we’ve identified that the current standard does not need to be changed.” The published proposal says that Mr. Wheeler places “little weight on quantitative estimates” of the mortality risk associated with fine soot pollution.
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Just last week, researchers at Harvard released the first nationwide study linking long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and Covid-19 death rates. The study found that a person living for decades in a county with high levels of fine particulate matter is 15 percent more likely to die from the coronavirus than someone in a region with one unit less of the fine particulate pollution. “The timing of this is unbelievable,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “There’s this big study that just came out linking this pollutant to Covid. This seems like a colossal mistake on the administration’s part.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/climate/coronavirus-soot-clean-air-regulations.html
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