“Be grateful to everyone.”
Buddhists in Tibet say this to remind themselves that adversity offers a path to enlightenment. In that spirit, this is an overdue thank-you note to former administrator Scott Pruitt, for reminding us what EPA is for. His efforts to roll back a host of air, water, and waste rules have forced us to recognize the extent to which those regulations reduce pollution and protect the environment.
First, a measurement of his tenure’s impact. David Cutler and Francesca Dominici, two public health experts at Harvard University, recently published a column in the Journal of the American Medical Association quantifying the impact on human lives and health as the critical metric for the stakes of the Pruitt EPA’s deregulatory agenda. They pegged the number of Americans facing premature death over the next decade at an additional 80,000, thanks to his regulatory rollbacks. And that may be a conservative estimate.
Read the full article here, which is the cover story of the Nov-Dec edition of Environmental Law Forum, by eli.org, and based in our work documenting the dismantling of EPA’s administrative capacities, in our EPA Mission Tracker.