The New York Times reports:

Disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates, the Trump administration declined on Tuesday to tighten a regulation on industrial soot emissions that came up for review ahead of the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrew R. Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his agency will not impose stricter controls on the tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, a regulatory action that has been in the works for months. The scientific evidence, he said, was insufficient to merit tightening the current emissions standard.

“We believe the current standard is protective of public health,” Mr. Wheeler said in a telephone call with reporters Tuesday morning. “Through the 5-year review process we’ve identified a lot of uncertainties. Through those uncertainties we’ve identified that the current standard does not need to be changed.”

The published proposal says that Mr. Wheeler places “little weight on quantitative estimates” of the mortality risk associated with fine soot pollution.

The decision brought praise from Republican lawmakers and the nation’s oil companies and manufacturers, which had said a tighter regulation on smokestack emissions of fine soot would harm their economic viability — even before the global health crisis cratered the global economy. [Continue reading…]