Huntington Canyon coal powered plant spews pollution.

Smoke and Mirrors

According to a report in the New York Times, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to change how it calculates air pollution deaths in an effort to mask increased mortality rates.

Back when he was running for president, Donald Trump regularly slammed President Obama’s Clean Power Plan—the EPA regulation aimed at reducing pollution from aging power plants—as part of a nefarious “war on coal.” But Trump didn’t realize that the Clean Power Plan was more than a carbon-cutting measure. It also vastly reduced particulate matter and other forms of air pollution. Cleaner air means healthier lungs, which means fewer premature deaths.

When Trump moved to replace the Clean Power Plan last year, it became immediately apparent that he had a problem: His watered-down alternative would result in an additional 1,400 deaths per year, all related to increased air pollution. In trying to revive the coal industry, Trump was waging a war on health.

Decades of research, beginning with correlational epidemiology and now extending to the molecular level, have proved the link […]