SOURCE: Inside Climate News
DATE: March 6, 2019
SNIP: The Trump administration’s efforts to undo rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases would lead to a rise in annual emissions of more than 200 million metric tons by 2025 and thousands more American deaths, according to a report from New York University Law School.
The added pollution would be equivalent to 44 million more cars driven every year or the burning of enough coal to fill more than 1 million railcars, the authors wrote in “Climate and Health Showdown in the Courts.”
The report, released Tuesday, homes in on six rules the administration has either tried to suspend or has announced plans to roll back, then calculates the possible damage based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. The regulations include: The Clean Power Plan, clean car standards, glider truck pollution rules, methane standards, methane reductions on federal lands, and landfill methane rules.
The increased sickness and mortality would be the products of climate change as well as increased pollution, such as smog and particulate matter, the report said.
The Trump administration’s decision to reverse course on a broad range of climate initiatives threatens to waste taxpayer dollars, too, the Government Accountability Office writes in a separate report issued Wednesday.
“It’s dangerous and reckless to say, ‘What we need is hair of the dog. We need more of this. We need more pollution. We need to burn more fossil fuels,'” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said at the press conference. “The president tries to cast this as an ideological war between liberals and conservatives and it’s not. It’s war between fact and fiction. It’s a war between science and magical thinking.”