11/28/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HAjQG6Cnh/
The Trump EPA is literally asking a judge to kill the clean-air standard that would have prevented thousands of deaths, because the science is inconvenient and industry wants the freedom to pollute without restraint.
Read that again: the EPA — the agency literally created to protect public health — is telling a judge, Please overturn our clean-air protections.
Why? Because industry didn’t like them. Because saving lives was too “expensive.” Because the administration is openly siding with the very companies pumping soot into our lungs.
The Biden rule lowered fine-particle pollution (PM2.5) from 12 µg/m³ to 9 µg/m³. Tiny particles, about one-thirtieth the width of a human hair. Small enough to slip straight through the lungs, into the bloodstream, into the heart.
That’s why scientists call it what it is: deadly.
But instead of defending the rule, Trump’s EPA told the court the Biden administration didn’t follow the “rigorous, stepwise process” required. So instead of fixing any supposed procedural issue, they want to erase the entire standard.
Not rewrite it.
Not revise it.
Erase it.
EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran even claimed the clean-air rule would cost “hundreds of millions, if not billions” if implemented — while Biden’s EPA estimated industry compliance would run around $590 million per year.
Translation: corporate profits matter more than American lives.
Environmental groups didn’t hold back.
John Walke from the Natural Resources Defense Council said the move strips Americans of “the right to breathe clean, safe air, free from deadly soot pollution.”
Earthjustice attorney Seth Johnson said the EPA has never abandoned its own legal defense of a soot-standard rule before. “They are running away from the standard without disputing the science,” he said. “They are asking the court to make the standard go away.”
And the people who will pay the price are the same communities that always pay: Black, brown, working-class, and frontline neighborhoods living near highways, refineries, and power plants — the very communities the Biden standard was designed to protect.
The Trump EPA wants to drag us back to the 2020 pollution limits — the weaker ones written during Trump’s first term. The ones scientists said were insufficient then, and catastrophic now.
This is what regulatory capture looks like.
This is what it looks like when industry writes policy.
This is what it looks like when the government decides that death is cheaper than regulation.
So let’s be clear: this isn’t about bureaucracy.
It’s about whether you get to breathe without risking heart failure or lung disease.
And if we don’t fight this now, the courts will decide — not the people, not the scientists, not the communities who inhale this air every day.
Clean air is not optional.It’s not negotiable. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be something the EPA is begging a court to take away.