A third of Americans still breathe unhealthy air after decades of improvements—which the Trump administration wants to roll back.
Updated at 11:37 a.m. on April 9, 2025
When you inhale a microscopic speck of soot, its journey may go like this: The particle enters your nose and heads into your lungs, penetrating even the tiny air sacs that facilitate gas exchange. Next it may slip into your bloodstream and flow into your heart, or past the blood-brain barrier. Most of us inhale some of these tiny particles every day. But inhaling enough can turn the act of breathing into an existential hazard, prompting or worsening asthma, COPD, respiratory infections, and permanent lung damage. In the heart, the specks can trigger heart disease, heart attacks, and most of the cardiovascular disorders you can think of. Air pollution is also associated with depression and anxiety, and with higher rates of suicide. It can trigger strokes and is linked to dementia or—even at average levels in this country—Parkinson’s disease.
These particles can also cross the placenta, where they can reduce an infant’s lung function before birth. A pre-polluted baby is also more likely to arrive prematurely, and at a lower weight. Exposure to bad air in utero is associated with a higher risk of autism, and exposure in childhood has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems, including lower IQ. A person’s lungs can develop until age 25, and as Alison Lee, a pulmonologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, put it to me, “once you’ve lost lung function, you can’t get it back.” Persistent exposure to air pollution can cause permanent harm, creating health problems for children and setting them up to become sicker adults.
It’s hard to picture a person dropping dead from air pollution, yet it happens all the time. In the United States, particulate matter is estimated to kill more than twice as many people as vehicular accidents do—in total, some 100,000 to 200,000 people a year, as an underlying factor of chronic disease or by way of heart attacks, asthma attacks, and other sudden events. Even as air quality in America has improved, researchers have found that relatively low concentrations of particulate matter can cause major hazards.
All of this stems from a toxic and mostly invisible danger, largely the product of burning things for fuel and letting the remnant drift into the air and then into us—which is what happens unless the government regulates that process. The Trump administration, however, has shown little interest in doing so. Through new policies and aggressive cuts, the administration is taking steps that will encourage more pollution while muffling the science that shows the harms. The very air that Americans breathe will likely become less safe.
So far, the EPA has announced that it will pursue a suite of rollbacks of environmental rules, among them a Joe Biden–era update to standards for particulate matter that were meant to be fully in force by 2032 and that the Biden EPA projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits. It also plans to reassess a rule limiting the amount of airborne mercury and arsenic that power plants can release. In a statement announcing one of these rollbacks, the EPA said that the U.S. has already made major gains in air quality, implying that these are enough. In response to a request for comment, an agency spokesperson told me that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s priority is “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”
The air in the U.S. certainly is cleaner than it was when industrial air pollution billowed into the skies unmitigated. Over the past 25 years alone, particulate air pollution in the country has dropped by more than 30 percent. Yet at least one in three Americans lives in a place where the air is still a health hazard. The particulate-matter standard that Zeldin intends to roll back is still nearly twice as high as the limit the World Health Organization recommends to protect health.
Rolling back rules will take time, but America’s air quality could worsen in the interim. The EPA told businesses last month that they can simply email the agency if they want an exemption from certain pollution regulations and that “the president will make a decision.” However they address those pleas, this opens a back door. The recent cuts to EPA personnel almost certainly mean that enforcement will suffer too. Meanwhile, worsening wildfire seasons, fueled by climate warming, are reversing decades of air-quality progress in this country. And ignoring and even stoking climate change, as Donald Trump’s administration is doing, will produce worse wildfire seasons. The country’s slide back toward its more polluted past “will become a steeper trajectory,” Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington whose work helped expose the connection between wildfire smoke and dementia risk, told me.
The administration’s cuts to scientific research mean, too, that the impact of its deregulation may never be fully understood. In recent months, the government has pulled down some air-quality data and canceled grants; it also plans to dissolve a whole EPA division dedicated to studying how the environment affects public health. These actions create a sort of purposeful naivete: You can’t regulate what you can’t prove is harmful, and you can’t prove harm without research.
And you certainly can’t solve for what you don’t yet know is a problem. Newer findings about how air pollution may addle a body—by worsening mental health or triggering more cases of neurodegenerative disease, for example—haven’t yet been included in the EPA’s risk-benefit assessments of air-quality regulations, Casey added. “I think often we’re underestimating the true impact,” she said.
When I called Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, she had just learned that the Trump administration had canceled her grant to study how impacts of climate change, including air pollution, alter cognitive function in aging people. (Earlier this year, too, she was dismissed from her appointment to the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, along with the rest of the panel.) Even so, the basics on air pollution have been studied enough that Kioumourtzoglou knows how current rollbacks will affect Americans: There will be “more heart attacks, more respiratory adverse health outcomes for sure,” she told me. “Our cognitive functions are going to be worse—the progression of Alzheimer’s, the progression of Parkinson’s.” Pollution-related depression and anxiety may go up. Even slightly increasing the risk or rate of any of these at the population level can diminish quality of life and, ultimately, productivity, she said. A sicker country is a poorer one.
Compared with smoking, for example, an individual’s risk of inhaling a dangerous amount of air pollution and then having their health affected because of it is relatively small, she told me—but “the problem is that few people smoke, and everybody breathes.” If a portion of the population’s cognitive function is diminished, even a little bit, the overall impact is enormous.
Kioumourtzoglou wonders, too, how much further the Trump administration will push the idea that air pollution should not be a concern to Americans. When the Heritage Foundation published a report in December that made the radical case that no definitive link exists between air pollution and poor public-health outcomes, she disregarded it. But after watching other Heritage Foundation goals be enacted, she is concerned that its rationale could be taken seriously by the current administration. The Heritage report attempts to cast doubt on the validity of decades of science by, in part, arguing that studies linking air pollution to health effects fail to prove causation, because they’re not randomized or controlled. (After this story was published, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said that the report was intended to guide federal policies and that it showed that “no causal link between particulates and heart attacks and deaths.”)
This is an attack not just on air-pollution research but on an entire scientific approach. Most public-health research is observational by necessity, because exposing people to air pollution in a lab setting to see how sick they get, say, wouldn’t be ethical. Instead, scientists gather data from already-exposed populations and try to parse out how different variables affected people’s health. Over decades, researchers have developed biostatistical methods to determine causal relationships from large groups of studies.
When EPA scientists and regulators link a pollutant and a health outcome, “they’re not making that assessment on one or two or three studies. It’s decades of scientific publications,” Corwin Zigler, a biostatistician at Brown University who served on an EPA scientific advisory panel on air pollution under the Biden administration, told me. He wasn’t surprised by the logic behind the Heritage Foundation report: The leader of the previous Trump administration’s air-pollution advisory panel had begun to sow doubt about basic air-pollution research. In response, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine undertook a major review of the way the EPA assesses causal relationships, and though it recommended that the EPA’s process be more transparent, it found its methods scientifically robust. Zigler said he has no doubt that particulate matter is causing harm at current levels in the United States: “That’s the scientific consensus. That takes very seriously all of the limitations of any given scientific study.”
Studies about how entire populations are harmed by air pollution are framed in probabilities and percentages, but they represent a multitude of individuals for whom daily living has been made tangibly worse. For Lee, the Mount Sinai pulmonologist, work became personal a few years ago, when her son, now 5, began having asthma attacks that would send him to the emergency room. Asthma is a common-enough ailment that an attack might seem like a routine and manageable health issue. But anyone who’s had a severe one will tell you differently. Over years of reporting on air pollution, I’ve had asthma attacks described to me as feeling like someone is stepping with their full weight on your ribcage, or as though you are suddenly a fish out of water, suffocating on land. It’s a traumatic event. Lee, knowing what she does about air pollution, decided to move her family from New York City to the suburbs a year and a half ago; they haven’t been to the emergency room since.
“Clearly, we know that where you live determines your health,” Lee told me, but few people can make a choice like she did, to upend their life to breathe cleaner air. The Trump administration is also cutting the programs intended to address exactly these geographic disparities, while working to make the air worse for everyone. EPA Administrator Zeldin has said these rollbacks are part of the administration’s plan to “unleash the Golden Age of American prosperity.” But prosperity does not mean choking to death in one’s own home or depriving a child of cognitive capacity. Whatever wealth is promised here is narrowly disbursed at others’ expense.
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Comments
I've observed this weird cognitive dissonance with outdoorsmen, since I am quite fond of fishing.
They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.
I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.
I think everybody has this sort of cognitive dissonance, albeit perhaps in different amounts; we just allocate it differently. And I think society is set up to help that. For example, I like animals and I eat meat. Would I kill a cow? No, but I'm happy to eat a burger. I've worked to get relatively comfortable with unresolved cognitive dissonance, so I can at least recognize my hypocrisy here. But I think it's way easier for people to refuse to think about it.
As with distributed systems, coherence is hard and expensive. Being rational about something, as opposed to just rationalizing, is long, slow work. We don't live in an age of patience. But perhaps one will come again, and until then we can at least try to be exceptions.
I would guess if you were starving to death you wouldn’t think twice about killing a cow.
There’s nothing wrong with fundamentally valuing life but also consuming it for sustenance. I’m guessing you wouldn’t vote for a law to torture cows while also saying you value a cow’s life.
That is essentially what the outdoorsmen are doing when voting for a politician that’s trying to remove environmental protections.
By wpietri 2025-04-1014:25 I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm saying there's a dissonance. And I'm saying it's important that we recognize that we all experience this dissonance, and that we should face it rather than just "get mad or change the subject".
> Would I kill a cow? No, but I'm happy to eat a burger.
You have to eat. If a burger is the best choice in front of you, it is reasonable to make that choice. Likewise, if a certain party is the best choice in front of you during an election, it is equally reasonable to choose it. Such decisions always require making tradeoffs.
However, the original comment seems to imply that it is not only a case of voting for a party, but also carrying out activism for that party. This is akin to you eating a burger while protesting with PETA proclaiming the evils of killing cattle. That may be still cognitive dissonance, but to a very different degree.
Depends what you mean by, "Best choice in front of you"
Most people in developed countries are not in a situation where if they do not eat the food in front of them now, they will starve. Nearly every grocery store should have things like tofu, lentil, beans, etc easily available. It may be most convenient, or most delicious, or something like that but vegetarianism and plant based are both very viable options for most of the developed world at this point.
Voting for a candidate in a 2 party system is not comparable, as there is literally not another viable choice in most cases.
If you won’t kill a cow but like eating burger that’s not cognitive dissonance.
I do not want to kill a cow personally, but I am aware meat I eat comes from cows. I would be against law that would make cow killing illegal. Not wanting to do something personally and accepting it happens for food is not cognitive dissonance. In general, I am ok with killing animals for food. If you killed a cow just for fun or sport, you are an asshole and I am against it. I feel no cognitive dissonance here.
Likewise, I am pro cleaning shit out of places. I prefer when someone else does it.
I don't think it's cognitive dissonance if you recognize the issue. Also, you can both enjoy a good burger and be disgusted at the idea of killing a cow yourself. As you said, it's simply an hypocrisy (of which I am guilty too). From Wikipedia [1], (emphasis mine):
> In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions.
Just a side note, but what happened to "hypocrisy"?
It used to mean having behavior that contradicts your stated beliefs.
Now it seems to mean an apparent contradiction between behavior and belief if you ignore real distinctions.
I don't like because it weakens the word and loses an important concept -- we don't have a good way to express real hypocrisy vs. fallaciously construed hypocrisy.
My brother wrote about this (and I won't pretend to understand the nuances).
This project explores the changing meaning of hunting in American political and cultural life from 1945 to the present by mapping the evolution of the ideas, vocabulary, and values legible on the pages of nationally circulated outdoor magazines. These sources suggest that huntingÆs public significance transformed in both character and intensity over the second half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar decades, the political culture forged and propagated in these magazines reflected a faith in government, in collective engagement, and in public life. However, in the 1970s, the ideas and principles articulated by many hunters and outdoor writers increasingly privileged individual rights, questioned the utility of state action, and defended private prerogatives. Concurrently, the degree to which hunting gave shape to the identity of American sportsmen heightened dramatically during this pivotal decade.
I didn't read the paper, but this sounds very familiar and similar to the change in the NRA.
Pre 1970s the NRA was very much a hobby gun club meant mostly to keep american boys/men using guns for war readiness, along with promoting hunting/outdoor recreation. Then, in the 1970s, the NRA changed tune. After a big leadership shakeup the organization became very proactive in promoting anti-government, 2nd amendment, and "patriot" ideals. This likely stems from the Nixon impeachment, wherein republicans felt "wronged" and actively started seeking out revenge.
The federalist society was also born out of this same period and sentiment. The sentiment is that nixon's impeachment was a hit job. That's when we saw the advent of conservative media and the idea that "emotions are more important than fact" started to get some traction.
There's a great This American Life episode on the NRA's transformation from a hobby group to a lobbying group. I think this is it, https://radiolab.org/podcast/radiolab-presents-more-perfect-... . Great episode, highly recommend. It really puts the whole 2a movement into perspective.
By pliesfan97 2025-04-1013:36 Randall Williams is your brother? He’s one of my favorites from the Meateater crew. Thanks for sharing his dissertation, I’ve been meaning to check it out at some point.
By jvanderbot 2025-04-1013:15 I've found so many of these contradictions in my own supporting of the household preferred political party that I've lost faith in parties altogether. They just lump too many issues together and expect you to accept them all.
By SkyPuncher 2025-04-1013:574 reply At the risk of being dismissive of people's interests, I've increasingly come to view many hunters and fishers are largely driven by the ego. They don't care if they can hunt or fish in 20 years as long as they can brag to their friend group that they bagged the biggest fish or game. In fact, it'd be better if they no one could hunt/fish in the future because that means they'd hold the "record" indefinitely.
All those pesky rules and regulations are just getting in the way.
Go sit in a bar in hunting country during deer season. You won't hear people talking about how peaceful, relaxing, or enjoyable it was. You either hear (1) them bragging about how big of deer they got (2) how big the deer was that "got away".
By jvanderbot 2025-04-1014:21 Bar talk vs actual experience is a matter of ritual. I picked up hunting late in life, and everyone privately says they love getting out, walking the land, relaxing, etc. But at the 6-8 "happy hours" each night, it's a bragfest. It's just culture.
By RajT88 2025-04-1015:33 I come from a family of hunters. We have those types, but we also have the types which just love the outdoors. Even the latter type has some manly-man schtick to their love of hunting, but it's partly about spending time with male friends and family. When someone ends up bagging a deer, the meat is shared around the family. Doesn't happen that often, but I look forward to it - I really love the gaminess of wild deer.
With fishing, I've observed a similar trend. There's plenty of people who just really love to geek out about fish (I am one of these), and keep detailed notes of the species they catch, where they caught them, the conditions, the baits/lures used, reading up on their ranges, behaviors, feeding habits, etc. There's other people who really love eating fresh fish, and they aren't into the process and community as much. There's a few ladies in my Chicago fishing group like this (one of whom is a high powered lawyer, as I understand it).
Some of the trophy fishermen want more rules and regulations, these tend to be the Musky fisherman who want their bodies of water to be mandated catch-and-release only.
The MAGA leaning fishermen seem like they can come in any of the above (and more) flavors. I'd be hard pressed to put a number on what % of fishermen I've run into are which types as well, regardless of their politics.
By s1artibartfast 2025-04-1015:35 >Go sit in a bar in hunting country during deer season. You won't hear people talking about how peaceful, relaxing, or enjoyable it was. You either hear (1) them bragging about how big of deer they got (2) how big the deer was that "got away".
There is nothing wrong with this. Its isn't mutually exclusive with a love and appreciation and respect for nature.
Yes there is an ego component, and that is OK too. It is a challenge and people derive satisfaction from success and accomplishment. How is it different than people excited about how productive their garden is or how many sweaters they knit for family.
I caught a big fish last weekend. I put in time, thought, and effort and paid off. I was happy and my friends were excited for my success (and dinner).
That doesn't mean I'm some nature hating egomaniac.
By anonfordays 2025-04-1014:441 reply This is an incredibly bad take. I can't think of a single hunter I've ran across that didn't talk about how peaceful, relaxing and enjoyable hunting is. I don't personally hunt, but all the big hunter personalities such as Joe Rogan, the Meateater crew, etc. constantly harp on the peacefulness of spending time in nature while hunting. My coworkers that hunt rarely talk/brag about what they shoot. Maybe they brag between themselves because the peacefulness and relaxation aspects are givens, everyone in the group understands that.
By giraffe_lady 2025-04-1013:411 reply There's a really interesting book that became about this because of an accident of timing and the author's research it's called Strangers in Their Own Land.
The author was writing about a specific region of louisiana that is all three of farther right than the norm even for a US rural area, more polluted than almost anywhere, and having a local culture that prizes connection to the land and natural systems present there.
It's very good! The author approaches these contradictions with more curiosity and care than you're going to find on HN even on its best days. https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land
I think about this book a lot. The point that stuck in my mind was that many of the folks living there were devout Christians. When one family was asked why they vote for the party that pollutes their land and waters they said that it's also the pro-life party and essentially nothing else matters if they don't vote pro life since they'll go to hell in the end.
Hunting and fishing are one of those hobbies that don't work anymore if everyone wants to do it. There's not enough room.
There's something in here about how low density people don't share values with high density people, because different situations cause problems.
By chneu 2025-04-1015:42 You're summing up most of the stuff rural americans get upset about.
Rural americans have insanely high pollution rates per capita because most of their lifestyle is really resource intensive, which just doesn't scale.
Not everyone can drive a ford f850 superduty deisel to go get groceries. Not everyone can eat beef 3x/day. Not everyone can live on a few acres. Not everyone can hunt. Not everyone can have livestock. Not everyone can have 5 kids. Etc, etc.
A lot of rural americans just don't understand this, or don't care. To them it's "out of sight, out of mind". Then, once it comes to their back yard they lose their minds reacting to it because it finally affects them. When it happens to other people, those people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When it happens to them, then it's a national emergency.
I grew up in a rural area, hometown of 500 people. I grew up thinking this way. It's a pretty big mind shift.
By givemeethekeys 2025-04-1014:14 Most people are too lazy / busy to hunt or fish, so this will only become a problem if food becomes unaffordable compared to spending a weekend trying to track a wild boar or going fishing as a necessity.
By iteratethis 2025-04-1014:56 I've always considered that it would make sense for there to be a "green right".
When conservative and rural and rejecting (some) modernity, I would expect one to appreciate and want to conserve nature as well as a lifestyle close to nature. Also, from an economic point of view, the conversion to sustainability is massive employment opportunity.
But no, the exact opposite is true.
By potato3732842 2025-04-1014:14 It's because they're too indoctrinated by modern culture to say "when it actually comes down to it I'd rather live in a prosperous but polluted society, at the end of the day like the necessity of making ends mmeet more than the luxury of bass fishing" which is basically what they're getting at with the sum of their beliefs but is an opinion that is fairly taboo to voice without a ton of beating around the bush.
Republicans have gone full doublethink. Remember when egg prices was the single most important issue of the election? Now when you ask those same people about rising inflation and the catastrophic economy they'll tell you to "get over it" or "stop being so materialist".
The same people that described themselves as "hard-core free speech absolutists" are perfectly fine with innocent men getting deported to El Salvador with no due process, or foreign scientists getting detained at the border for having criticized the president on social media.
This country is fucked, half of its inhabitants now live with Fox News induced cognitive dissonance and are literally "ride or die" with the GOP. There's nothing Trump or his administration could do that would make them reconsider their support.
> half of its inhabitants now live with Fox News induced cognitive dissonance and are literally "ride or die" with the GOP.
This is a bit of an overstatement. In 2024, Trump received 49.8% of the vote on 64.1% turnout, which is only 31.9% of eligible voters and of course doesn't include millions of people who are ineligible to vote, mostly due to age. And some of Trump's total, relatively small yet crucial, consisted of nonpartisan "swing" voters who are not loyal to Trump or the GOP. The way our electoral system works, small differences are greatly magnified.
The problem is we have a strongly factional two party system where the most productive strategy is to reap hatred between the factions. This is mostly a consequence of our plurality voting system.
By 93po 2025-04-1016:21 We also have a political environment that tries to gloss over the ways the two parties are similarly problematic and damaging while championing the idea that "we're the party of all things good and right and the other people are responsible for all bad positions".
Dems and Republicans alike support carbon emitting methods of power generating that result in over a million deaths a year worldwide. Voting for Trmp vs Bden probably doesn't have any real appreciable effect on worldwide pollution levels.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-04-1013:192 reply I think some of this is down to the inability of some folk (that to be clear, I think is stoked by the parties for marketing purposes) to differentiate between the beliefs of their party and their own personal beliefs. In this way, parties are not a matter of beliefs really as much as they're a matter of identity. I've witnessed this with my own family: my parents are and have always been Republican, and even though they hate Trump and virtually every policy he stands for, they still voted for him. When questioned why, you get various somewhat incoherent notions of hating Democrats. And... fair, as a Leftist, I also hate Democrats, haha. But I still voted Harris because as distasteful as I find the Dem establishment, they're closer to anything I want to see in the world than anything on offer on the other side.
By lapcat 2025-04-1013:36 This is basically it. When you define your identity by what you're against rather than what you're for then your own principles and beliefs are easily compromised. Partisans are blinded to inconsistency and corruption in their own party because the focus is always on "the other side", who are always considered worse, and thus anything is justified to fight the other side.
By mindslight 2025-04-1013:56 Take a step back and look at the information flows of democracy. One or two ballots per year, with a handful of questions on them. For the national races, that is maybe 3 bits/year on average? Compare with the constant stream of ads, speeches, news articles, etc. Then at the higher level it's not like adding repeated answers to the same question preserves much information (cf Central Limit Theorem). So really the information flows to the voters are the more significant part of this setup, with the act of choosing serving as a commitment to make you think you wanted everything you voted for.
By s1artibartfast 2025-04-1014:132 reply As an outdoorsman, fisher, and hunter, I view the other party as at war my hobbies.
California banned the diesel engines being used by the fishing boat I went out on. Without 300k to retrofit, the charter went out of business and everyone lost their jobs.
By triceratops 2025-04-1014:501 reply > I view the other party as at war my hobbies.
And they think you put your hobby above other people's lungs. shrugs
I'm sorry about the charter going out of business. A better bill would've made provisions to help businesses with upgrade costs.
Think of everyone's point of view. Not just "my hobby" and "they're doing stuff to me". If you don't care about others they won't care about you. That's what society is.
Would you rather there be no outdoors for your grandchildren to hunt in? The “other party” isn’t at war with hunting, they just want a planet that’s livable for future generations.
Yea, see, I always thought that "conservative" meant people wanted to keep things the same and that included natural resources, like wilderness.
But instead, they want the '50's back. The 1850's. I'll leave it at that.
By Whoppertime 2025-04-1220:361 reply https://www.independent.org/article/2021/11/22/the-new-blue-... You would find this article from Victor Davis Hanson interesting
By kahrl 2025-04-1013:37 The plastic lady on TV told them Obama was gonna raise egg prices more.
By damnesian 2025-04-1015:22 Midwesterner here. Past generations of conservatives were also very conservation minded. They understood the lasting value of preserving our natural resources. Hell back in the 80s and 90s it was normal for Reagan Republicans to also be in the Sierra Club. That very reasonable centrist organization is now chastized as "radical left," that's how far down the slippery slope we are. They are due for a very rude awakening, but by the time they realize it, it will all be ruined. They don't care about anything if it doesn't affect them directly, the polar opposite of the story of the ancient middle eastern rabbi they name check as their god and savior.
It's not just that people care about many things at once, but they have different assumptions about how much real-world output will result from a particular political input.
For example, this article is about air pollution. Trump rolled back a number of Obama-era air pollution rules in 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/04/trump-em.... But there was no corresponding increase in air pollution in the subsequent six years: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c2....
So your friends simply don't believe that rolling back particular environmental regulations will meaningfully reduce the quality of the environment. It's similar to how liberals downplay how much reshoring of industry will result from the Trump administration's tariffs.
By supplied_demand 2025-04-1014:312 reply ==It's similar to how liberals downplay how much reshoring of industry will result from the Trump administration's tariffs.==
I haven't seen a coherent explanation or estimate of impact made by the administration. If a strategy that estimates the amount of reshoring exists, I'd love to see it. The constant back-and-forth on tariffs makes it seems more like the whims of one individual rather than a coherent plan for "reshoring of industry."
In your comments, you seem to continually give one side the benefit of the doubt, but use a completely different set of rules when discussing the other side.
It even seems to come out in your analysis as your source shows that 2023 saw the most days of unhealthy PM2.5 levels since 2012. It went from 724 in 2017, to 822 in 2023. That is a 13.5% increase. It appears you might be falling into the same trap you warn everyone else about.
Edited to add: On tariffs, Republican Senator Ron Johnson admits, “I still don’t know exactly what his total strategy is.” [0] Yet, you expect everyday liberals to have some nuanced view of the policy.
I mean there is a LOT more to life then fishing and hunting that people might care about? And even if we want to restrict ourselves to fishing and hunting there are more issues then just polution that may sway peoples minds. Gun control? Most of the anti hunting groups and extreme environmental groups that want to shutdown any form of hunting are often composed of far left leaning people. But the biggest reason is probably these people tend to live in more republican leaning areas and care about the same issues their friends and neighbors do.
By mindslight 2025-04-1014:20 The same exact cognitive dissonance dynamic applies to "gun control". The murder of Breonna Taylor was a straightforward transgression of the 2nd amendment - direct summary execution by government agents for defending your family in your home at night (one of the exact touchstone scenarios for the "self defense" line of arguments). Yet "the right" fell in line behind the government authoritarian jackboots because their political machine told them to.
By amazingamazing 2025-04-1013:175 reply I’ve observed that generalizations are usually wrong. There are plenty of MAGA people who care about the environment, and there are indeed MAGA people who couldn’t care less too.
It’s also strange to single out MAGA on cognitive dissonance- everyone, regardless of political affiliation has it.
At the end of the day blame the two party system. There are hundreds of thousands of people who voted for Obama and Trump, Biden and then Trump again. Let that sink in.
By yCombLinks 2025-04-1013:291 reply MAGA is level 10 on it. They went from the hardcore Christian party to supporting the biggest crook American politics has ever seen, that isn't even capable of basic kindness. Same with veterans. A draft dodger, that has called our fallen soldiers losers, and skipped out on ceremonies honoring them, that presidents traditionally attend. MAGA jumped from deficit hawks, to supporting huge tax cuts that will explode the deficit. It's not even close who is worse here.
By kahrl 2025-04-1013:32 While everyone has the ability to have cognitive dissonance, please don't ignore the reality that MAGA is a bunch of weirdo cultist fuckos brainwashed by extremist propaganda media.
It's not much of a generalization if I'm talking about the people in my community. YMMV.
By monkey_monkey 2025-04-1013:34 The majority of MAGA don't care about the environment (especially wrt climate change), and in fact probably no longer believe that pollution is harmful.
I would not be surprised if smoking also makes a comeback as MAGA types continue down the anti-science crusade and pour scorn on the link between smoking and lung cancer and other types of health outcomes.
I mean, I don't understand how you could care about the environment and vote for Trump.
He's actively unwinding decades of environmental policy and protections, destaffing and defunding national parks, and opening up logging 100MM acres which will be gone in no time at all.
He's the kind of guy that says "we are going to have the cleanest air and water" and then literally does the opposite policy wise.
By ilrwbwrkhv 2025-04-1013:146 reply It's almost like people are complicated and when you are forced to choose between two parties you almost always go for the stronger male person
By hackyhacky 2025-04-1013:22 > It's almost like people are complicated and when you are forced to choose between two parties you almost always go for the stronger male person
That seems like an unfair conclusion not rooted in empirical evidence. How do you explain the numerous democratically elected female heads of state? What does "strong" mean here? Do you think that current US leadership is "strong" or merely "loud"?
By AnimalMuppet 2025-04-1013:192 reply People are complicated and their behavior can be predicted by a single variable?
That does not explain vote for Trump who is basically anti-masculine. He is basically walking stereotype of hysterical mind changing woman ... except in male shape.
By kahrl 2025-04-1013:41 People are complicated.....they vote for the strongman. You realize how those two things you said are diametrically opposed???? Stupid.
By JohnFen 2025-04-1013:45 I'm not sure that observations match this hypothesis, actually. But this
> the stronger male person
raises an interesting point (ignoring the "male" part) -- there isn't any real consensus on what attributes indicate "strength" (for instance, there are a lot of people who consider Trump strong, and a lot of people who equally consider him weak).
So the hypothesis could be true, but not terribly enlightening.
By myvoiceismypass 2025-04-1014:00 Speaking for yourself buddy.
Why would it “give them pause”?
Your question (as phrased here) is clearly provocative rather than curious and represents your biases (eg, “openly wants to mess up your pastime”). You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.
Are you really surprised people are annoyed by that behavior?
It didn’t come across as provocative to me. It would be a snowflake reaction to get indignant at such a small amount of “provocative” language.
The essence of the question is why do people who love the outdoors vote for politicians who want to repeal laws to protect the outdoors?
I presume that a reasonable person can easily answer this question and defend their position. I can think of several reasonable explanations and I’m opposed to hunting and am in favor of strong environmental regulations.
By RajT88 2025-04-1015:00 My language was anything but extreme. I would make the case based on your response that you would jump to some assumptions:
> You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.
Rather than asking the question. It's deeply curious how making assumptions instead of asking questions is called out as incurious. If you were motivated to inquire, how would you approach it?
By skeeter2020 2025-04-1013:431 reply Maybe it's because you're not really asking a question but making an insulting statement intended to ellict exactly this reaction. Even if this sort of "question" was genuine it's predicated on a huge set of assumptions and systems interactions that makes it worthless as a question, but great as a campaign gotcha!
Also, fishing is most definitely not a "sport".
By rideontime 2025-04-1013:471 reply Fishing for non-commercial/sustenance purposes is quite literally referred to as "sport fishing." Perhaps you should save the condescending tone for topics you're more familiar with.
One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China". In reality doing things more cleanly can make a huge difference to your local environment. Do you want to live right next to a coal-fired power plant just because that's what they do in China? Do you want to walk past roads clogged with dirty, polluting cars?
By wormlord 2025-04-1013:34 China has outlined plans to reduce their environmental impact in their 5-year plan. One can say "wow do you really trust the CCP?" but at least they have a publicly available plan.
https://en.ndrc.gov.cn/policies/202303/P02023042539857072035...
That's lying with statistics. They arrived at their conclusion and then cherry picked a metric that supports it.
Per-capita emissions is the only metric that has any meaning, since it isn't altered by historical happenstance as to whether a country is large or was split into multiple countries due to historical events.
If China split into two countries tomorrow, suddenly they would be doing better on this deceitful metric but the ground truth has not changed one bit.
By Whoppertime 2025-04-1220:47 Per capita emissions is effected by population, and historical events that influence that capita being measured, like the Covid 19 outbreak. If you have 100,000 people living in a town emitting 100,000 tons of emissions and 10% of the population died due to happenstance, epidemiological or otherwise so you now have 90,000 people emitting 100,000 tons of emissions and the per capita rate went up despite no change in their production method or the amount of emissions they are producing.
By throw0101c 2025-04-1013:46 > One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China".
1. Implement a mechanism domestically to reduce pollution. [1][2]
2. Then implement a "carbon/pollution tariff" on any imports[3] so that foreigners are hit the same way domestics folks are (perhaps with allowances for developing companies that are too poor for advanced pollution control).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Canada_Air_Quality_Agreem...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...
Trump started calling coal "beautiful clean coal". At this point I think he could convince his followers that the sky is red and no one would bat an eye.
By ada1981 2025-04-1013:50 It's really wild. I'm not sure if people have just reached a level of fatigue with the lies -- they say after so many lies peoples brains just shut down discernment of truth.. He leverages this very well.
In absence of truth, its just trolling and abuse. I think for some of the followers, this is what they really want. They have lives devoid of meaning and subjectivity as they are long numb, and so watching someone troll / hurt others (including them at times) helps them feel anything.
By ffsm8 2025-04-1015:36 That's my biggest peave wrt climate change...
Why do they keep trying the doomsday messaging?
Its too far into the future, hence irrelevant for most current consumers. And even if they thought it relevant, if you take it at face value: whatever you're doing won't solve the issue anyway, because it's a global issue.
The messaging has to go back to local effects. Literally everything you should do for the climate has a lot of positive effects short term... I e. don't try to outlaw ICE vehicles in cities because of climate... Massively tax them because the they reduce the air quality and cause noise pollution
By tjpnz 2025-04-1013:54 There are people who would answer yes to both of those questions and then proceed to spout all manner of bullshit about it being harmless.
> projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits.
That's the even crazier part - the savings in health benefits. Not sure what it takes to motivate even the most selfish out there.
Couldn't that also be reframed as less profit for the healthcare industry?
By dymk 2025-04-1014:27 It could be reframed as less loss for the insurance companies
I think the crazy part is that the math of 46 billion divided by 804,500 is almost 60k/case.
Maybe this is also highlighting a different problem.
By chewbacha 2025-04-1013:29 Take away the welfare and stop paying taxes. Then there’s no health benefits to spend on.
Pretty sure this is why they are dismantling Medicaid and Medicare now.
It’s all aligned to put us back into 1890s when billionaires ran everything and people lived in tenement housing.
By lawn 2025-04-1013:42 The same people that are pushing for increased pollution broadly support banning abortions, cutting down Usaid, and want to ban vaccines.
The evidence points to saving lives is not a priority, or they're just clueless.
