Trump’s war on climate policy is also a war on public health

Obama’s Clean Power Plan would avert asthma attacks and premature deaths. Trump wants to undo it.  

With his latest executive order, President Donald Trump will try to roll back President Obama’s climate legacy. But what’s largely been lost in the conversation is how much this executive order could also impact people’s health. Whether Trump acknowledges it or not, climate change and human health are inextricably linked. Stepping back the fight against climate change will also be a massive loss for public health.

The order’s principal target is Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the key Environmental Protection Agency rule that aims to cut emissions from existing US power plants — a big driver of climate change — 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (For all the other things the executive order does, read Brad Plumer’s explainer.)

While the big focus is on keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, what’s also significant about the plan is the hundreds of thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution it would prevent. These greenhouse gases are not only harmful to the environment but also increase the risk of everything from asthma to heart disease.

The Clean Power Plan, in other words, has been a big win for health. According to the EPA, cutting exposure to particle pollution in the order the CPP does would have averted up to 3,600 premature deaths, 90,000 asthma attacks in children, and 1,700 heart attacks each year.

Which means that Trump’s plan “is a one-two punch to human health and the environment,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Greenhouse gases are an enormous risk to human health. So this means we’ll continue to be exposed to these gases, which exacerbate asthma, heart disease, strokes.”

According to the Global Burden of Disease project, more than 5 million people die worldwide each year because of air pollution — and emissions from coal-fired plants are a major risk factor here. It’s one reason why health experts have been pushing policymakers to rapidly phase out of coal.

For miners, the immediate health risks include black lung disease and scarring of the lung tissue. But the pollutants emitted when coal is processed — including sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and mercury — have much more far-reaching effects on many more people.

In one large study involving 450,000 Americans followed between 1982 and 2004, researchers found that increased exposure to the particles in fossil fuel emissions increased the risk of death from heart disease — and particles from coal burning were five times more damaging than other similar particles.

Reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants also makes it easier to breathe. Over the past 30 years, the percentage of Americans with asthma has more than doubled, and climate change has been a significant driver of that trend. Air pollution triggers asthma attacks, contributing to lung abnormalities, particularly in the developing pulmonary systems of children.

The impacts of the executive order won’t be immediate. The DC Circuit Court is currently considering the Clean Power Plan’s legality and will eventually issue a verdict. Once that happens, EPA head Scott Pruitt will need to work with the agency to write a new rule to replace it. And the public health and environmental communities will try to influence any proposed regulatory changes.

Right now, public health isn’t a big part of the conversation about Trump administration assault on climate change mitigation policies. It needs to be. It’s not just the future of the planet that’s at stake here.