Last August, the soot fetishists in the Trump administration released a proposal to prop up dying coal plants by giving states free rein to come up with their own rules, or let them petition to opt out of profit-killing regulations altogether. Among the many problems with Donald Trump’s “Affordable Clean Energy rule”? Technical analysis from his own Environmental Protection Agency showed that whereas Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan was expected to prevent between 1,500 and 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030, Trump’s replacement would cause as many as 1,400 premature deaths (just in America) each year. To many people, that seemed like a lot! So the administration has come up with a new tactic to get the nation on board. No, it’s not to keep Obama’s plan in place or to actually make sources of human-killing dirty energy comply with any sort of legitimate oversight. Instead, it’s to ignore science to get those pesky predicted deaths out of future disclosures.

The New York Times reports that the E.P.A. plans to “get thousands of deaths off the books,” not by doing anything to actually prevent those deaths, but by altering “the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution,” which would “make it easier to roll back a key climate-change rule.” (According to reporter Lisa Friedman, “The E.P.A. . . . is normally expected to demonstrate that society will see more benefits than costs” from a rule change, and apparently some people don’t get that killing off four figures’ worth of Americans per annum is a worthy trade-off for increased corporate profits.) Naturally, experts say the new modeling method is “not scientifically sound,” a situation that obviously poses no concern for this White House:

The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. . . . in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.

Fine particulate matter—the tiny, deadly particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream—is linked to heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory disease.