US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths
Economist found that a strong economy, wildfires and lax environmental protection are to blame
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Your support makes all the difference.A new study shows that air quality in the United States suffered between 2016 and 2018, after seven straight years of improvement starting during the first years of Barack Obama's administration.
The rise in pollution— which data shows started in 2016, just before Donald Trump took office and after years of economic recovery in the United States — has led to thousands of premature deaths across the country, according to the economists from Carnegie Mellon University who studied Environmental Protection Agency data from those time periods.
“That increase was associated with 9,700 premature deaths in 2018,” wrote Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller in a new paper detailing their research.
The researchers determined that the deaths had a heavy economic toll, in addition to the obvious human loss: around $89 billion in damages, they say.
The causes of the rise in particulate matter comes from a variety of sources, the researchers said, including a strong US economy, the burning of wildfires in parched areas of the country, and the destruction of American environmental protection rules, which Donald Trump’s administration has pursued vigorously.
When it comes to the economy, a major culprit of pollution has been the increased use of trucks to transport goods, the researchers said, leading to increased burning of dirty fossil fuels.
“The chemical composition of particulates point to increased use of natural gas and to vehicle miles travelled as likely contributors to the increase” in pollution, they wrote. “We conclude that the effect is due to diesel vehicles as well as some industrial boilers.”
The rise in wildfires was marked beginning in 2016, especially in California, where devastating blazes have occurred very close to population centres.
Finally, the decreased quality of air was attributed to attacks on the US Clean Air Act, which the Union of Concerned Scientists has previously credited with preventing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths across the US.
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