During the coronavirus crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the voice of reason. Much of the public turns to him for critical information about public health while even President Trump finds it necessary to listen. In the Trump era, no one plays that role in the environmental arena. The result is a mindless campaign of deregulation that imperils public health and safety.
We can't clone Dr. Fauci or duplicate the unique circumstances that have made his voice so powerful. However, we can do several things that would make it harder for administrations to ignore science:
The Trump administration initiative involving power plant emissions is particularly blatant. Cutting the emissions of toxics, like mercury, from burning coal will also cut emissions of fine particulates, thereby saving many lives. At this point, the Trump administration is engaged in a weird maneuver to eliminate the legal basis for the existing regulation while leaving the regulation itself in effect. But, if successful, the result will be to block tighter future regulations that could save more lives. How does the Trump administration justify this move? The answer is simple: It says that those thousands of deaths don't count because those people will be dying from the wrong cause (particulates rather than mercury).
As a recent article in the flagship scientific journal Science by a team of Harvard and Berkeley economists explains, this makes no sense from a policy perspective and violates the standard methodology for cost-benefit analysis used by the federal government. Moreover, they point out, the administration is also using stale data from 2011, which we now know underestimates the health impact of mercury emissions and badly overestimates the current costs of maintaining the regulation. They found "no defensible, economic basis" for the action. In fact, the administration's action makes so little sense that it was sharply criticized by EPA's scientific advisory board, even though the board's members were handpicked by the Trump administration.
The other recent Trump administration initiative involves a rollback of fuel efficiency standards for cars. The rollback will cost the public money in the form of higher gasoline costs; it injures public health by increasing air pollution; and it accelerates climate change through higher carbon emissions. Independent experts have been aghast since the early stages of this deregulatory effort. A recent analysis by economists at the highly respected environmental economics think tank, Resources for the Future, concludes that the Obama-era regulation is fully justified. Their findings "strongly suggest that these fuel economy standards have substantially benefited society on balance." Again, even EPA's handpicked scientific advisory board was sharply critical of the Trump administration initiative.
These issues may seem far removed from the coronavirus, but they're not. They involve the same blindness to science and indifference to public health that Trump showed until mid-March about the epidemic. There's another possible connection: evidence that people living in places with higher air pollution are more at risk from the coronavirus.
The public deserves to know the truth about the ways in which regulating pollution and toxic chemicals protects public health. People aren't getting the information they need about public health and pollution from the Trump administration. We need to fix that problem going forward.
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Daniel Farber | April 17, 2020
During the coronavirus crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the voice of reason. Much of the public turns to him for critical information about public health while even President Trump finds it necessary to listen. In the Trump era, no one plays that role in the environmental arena. The result is a mindless campaign of deregulation that imperils public health and safety. We can't clone Dr. Fauci or duplicate the unique circumstances that have made his voice so powerful. However, we can do several things that would make it harder for administrations to ignore science.
Darya Minovi | April 16, 2020
On April 29, the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) will host a webinar to discuss the public health and policy implications of COVID-19 and to highlight the many policy parallels between the pandemic and climate change. Speakers include Daniel Farber, JD, of UC Berkeley (and a CPR Member Scholar); Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Aaron Bernstein, MD, MPH, of Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School. Join us!
Laurie Ristino | April 15, 2020
Americans are experiencing a tidal wave of food insecurity related to the coronavirus pandemic. Historic unemployment claims and surging demand at food banks are laying bare the precarious circumstances of many of our citizens and the inadequacy of our social safety net. We can learn from the coronavirus epidemic--and we must in order to prevent human suffering in the future. Taking stock and then reforming our policies should start now while legislative momentum is possible--not after the country has moved past the apex of the disease. In a recent episode of the podcast, Good Law/Bad Law, Laurie Ristino joined host Aaron Freiwald to discuss the vital connection between the 2018 Farm Bill, the pandemic, and the startling food insecurity so many Americans are now facing.
Thomas McGarity, Wendy Wagner | April 13, 2020
Over the last month, the scripts of the daily White House COVID-19 briefings have followed a familiar pattern: President Trump leads off with assurances that the crisis remains “totally under control” and that miracle cures are just around the corner. Then agency experts come to the microphone and tell a very different story. For example, on March 19, the president reported that the Food and Drug Administration “very, very quickly” approved a malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, for treating COVID-19 that it had previously approved for lupus, malaria, and rheumatoid arthritis. Later in the briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned listeners that controlled testing would have to be completed before we know whether the drug works on the novel coronavirus. And FDA later warned that it had definitely not approved hydroxychloroquine for fighting the virus.
Rena Steinzor | April 10, 2020
If you were the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as news of the coronavirus pandemic hit, what would you do to implement your mission to protect public health? The best answer has three parts: first, determine what specific categories of pollution could exacerbate the disease; second, assemble staff experts to develop lists of companies that produce that pollution; and, third, figure out how the federal government could ensure that companies do their best to mitigate emissions.
Katie Tracy | April 9, 2020
On April 9, the Center for Progressive Reform joined the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health in calling on the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) to retract its outrageous guidance that allows employers to send workers potentially exposed to coronavirus back to work without any guaranteed protections. This flawed guidance is weaker than previous guidance, fails to protect workers, and is not based on scientific evidence.
James Goodwin | April 9, 2020
Who does the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) work for? The answer would seem to be us, the American public, given that the statutes it is charged with implementing are focused first and foremost on protecting our health and the natural environment we all depend upon. The Trump administration, however, has transformed this critical protector agency into a powerful of tool of corporate polluters, one dedicated to fattening these industries’ already healthy bottom lines at the expense of the broader public interest. The evidence of this brazen degree of corporate capture at the Trump EPA abounds.
Joel A. Mintz | April 8, 2020
It has often been observed that natural disasters bring out the best and worst in people. Sadly, with regard to environmental protection, the coronavirus pandemic has brought out the worst in the Trump administration. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Trump's EPA has continued to propose and implement substantial rollbacks in important safeguards to our health and the environment while issuing an unduly lax enforcement policy. In a memorandum issued March 26, EPA's Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance announced a "temporary" policy governing EPA enforcement during the pandemic. It declares the agency will now not seek civil penalties when pollution sources violate "routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training and reporting or certification obligations" as a result of COVID-19.
David Driesen | April 8, 2020
Last week, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán used the coronavirus as an excuse to secure emergency legislation giving him permanent dictatorial powers. President Trump has long admired Orbán and emulated the democracy-undermining strategies that brought Hungary to this point — demonizing opponents; seeking bogus corruption investigations against opposition politicians; using vicious rhetoric, economic pressures, and licensing threats to undermine independent media; and whipping up hatred of immigrants. Trump's autocratic approach to expertise has facilitated the spread of the coronavirus, as he dismantled the apparatus in place to prepare for and deal with a pandemic and caused leading experts to resign, and he has repeatedly used White House coronavirus briefings to blunt needed public health warnings by substituting his imagined "common sense" for the advice of actual experts.