Justification for the War on the Environment Overlooks the Obvious

Perhaps the single saddest aspect of the Trump Administration’s war on the environment is that, though it’s premised on growing the economy, it comes at enormous hard costs in terms of human health alone.  Per this article: Separate studies done in 2016 by the World Bank and by the Health Effects Institute (a U.S. non-profit corporation funded by the EPA and the auto industry) estimated that air pollution kills between 91,000 and 100,000 Americans each year—nearly double the number of U.S. combat deaths (58,000) in Vietnam. 

Of course, for everyone who actually loses his battle against the lung disease caused by pollution, there are far more who battle the disease, year after year, at great cost, in hospitals and home care. Even discounting the physical and emotional suffering of these millions of people and their families, this whole idea of environmental deregulation is pitifully lame on the basis of the actual financial costs alone.

We’re all familiar with the Harvard Medical School’s report estimating the cost of burning coal—to the U.S. alone—at half a trillion dollars annually.   For some reason, few people seem to care.