Jurisprudence
Aug 02, 20269:00 AM
Daniel Heuer/Reuters
Recently, millions of Americans have faced orange skies and air-quality alerts. The struggles many people had with the smoke are a sad reminder of the importance air quality has for our health. Yet the Trump administration has done everything in its power to make our air less clean. Now it is adopting new, stealthier strategies to weaken clean-air standards.
During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation. In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics. The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.
