The Trump administration is planning to change how it counts the number of people killed by air pollution each year, in a shift that would dramatically undercount premature deaths due to dirty air. The Environmental Protection Agency previously estimated that Trump’s move to roll back the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan would kill an additional 1,400 people per year due to inhalation of fine particulate matter—air pollution that’s linked to heart attacks, strokes and respiratory disease. But under the EPA’s newly proposed analytical model, many of those deaths would no longer be counted.
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