Air pollution is making Utah a paradise lost
Read UPHE’s cofounder and president, Dr. Brian Moench’s latest op-ed in the Utah News Dispatch.
Utah leaders like to brag about the “Utah Way,” that we’re different, or “special.” U.S. News and World Report has ranked Utah the best state in the country three years in a row. But I wonder if anyone from that publication has visited Utah in the last two weeks. Because lately we have also been “number one” in the country in something far less admirable — deadly air pollution. As many as 8,000 Utahns die annually from our air pollution and it costs our economy billions.
Fixing or even acknowledging our notorious air pollution has completely fallen off Utah’s radar. The legislature’s bipartisan Clean Air Caucus has disappeared. I have not read or heard about a single clean air bill filed by the Legislature. I have not heard any lip service from any of our state leaders about air pollution in a long time, nor from our members of Congress. Rather Utah’s Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C. have become headquarters for a full-frontal assault on clean air, clean water, and environmental protection of any kind.
Last year, EPA Director Lee Zeldin signaled right out of the gate that he would turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Polluter Protection Agency. He broadcast that EPA’s mission would be to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses. He then announced rollbacks of 31 clean air and clean water regulations to power the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. History.”
Recently Zeldin announced EPA would simply abandon its role of regulating greenhouse gases at all, including automobile carbon emissions. This week he announced the EPA would no longer even try to quantify the human health costs of pollution or the benefits of regulations.
The rest of the world is moving quickly toward electric vehicles to limit greenhouse gas emissions. But President Donald Trump’s EPA wants to drive a stake through the heart of that movement. Even automakers think much of this deregulatory frenzy is over the top. The Business Roundtable, an influential council of large companies which includes major polluters like 3M, General Motors, and Chevron, wrote in comments to the EPA, “Attempting to comply with multiple, likely conflicting, regulations among the states will drive up compliance costs for companies, create obstacles for investment decisions, lead to regulatory uncertainty, and make efficient reduction of emissions more difficult.” Even oil lobbyists such as the American Petroleum Institute have asked the EPA not to repeal the greenhouse gas rules for power plants. But if Trump prevails, count on more tailpipe and smokestack pollution on the Wasatch Front thanks to his infatuation with fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine.
Gov. Spencer Cox, legislative leaders, and Utah’s congressional delegation have all remained silent about this brazen attack on your life and your health. In fact they’ve joined in on it.
In November the Trump EPA said it would reverse the tighter PM2.5 standard set by the Biden administration in 2024 and not defend the rule in court against 25 Republican-led states, including Utah, that had filed suit to stop the EPA from making our air cleaner. It’s hard for Utah’s political leaders to claim they care about clean air when they literally went to court to make it dirtier. And this was the third time Utah has done that. They appealed to the Biden EPA to allow Utahns to breathe more ozone. They act like clean air is a punishment.
The Trump administration is trying to resuscitate a dying coal industry by reopening federal lands to mining, stripping environmental reviews, subsidizing coal-fired electricity and coal exports, and ordering coal plants to stay open. But calling coal “beautiful and clean” doesn’t make it so, nor does it make it cheap. The levelized cost of electricity from new coal plants is more than double that of solar, wind and natural gas, according to Bloomberg NEF, even disregarding all the health and climate damage of burning coal.
Meanwhile Utah’s leaders are throwing caution to wind and pollution into the air by having the Utah Inland Port Authority force-feed us all a massive network of warehouses and water-intensive data centers, paving over fragile wetlands that act as pollution sponges, and ushering in more truck and train pollution. There are bills like HB60 that will actually accelerate the collapse of the Great Salt Lake into a toxic dust bowl.
The legislature has now convened for the 2026 general session, and with it their perennial pursuit of making Utah a family values and economic paradise. But citizens need to let them know that without clean air, Utah is just paradise lost.