In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out plans to overturn 31 environmental regulations aimed at curbing carbon emissions and protecting clean air and water, as part of a dramatic remaking of the agency.

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” Zeldin said at the time, saying the effort would save “trillions in regulatory costs.”

Among the regulations Zeldin said he would reconsider is an air quality standard established last year under President Joe Biden. By the end of the fall, according to an Environmental Protection Agency legal motion, Zeldin will propose a new, looser health standard for fine particulate matter — a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, wildfires and some manufacturing that has been linked to lung, heart and neurological diseases. The agency plans to finalize the rule by February, the motion said.

While Long Island’s air quality meets the current federal standard, there are significant local sources that emit particulate matter — tiny motes of dust, soot and chemicals.

Additionally, pollution from the Midwest and South drifts across Long Island. Relaxing the standard could impair air quality, both on Long Island and nationally, which would lead to an increase in health problems and premature deaths, public health experts said.

Most health organizations, including the American Lung Association, the American Thoracic Society and the World Health Organization, have argued for even tighter standards.

“This health standard was an important recognition that the science shows an unacceptable number of people are dying from this pollution,” said John Walke, director of federal clean air at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The impending rollback, he fears, “will just flatly contradict the medical science about how dangerous this pollution is.”

In announcing his plan for a less stringent rule for fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Shirley, said the existing standard would “shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses.”

“The Trump EPA believes that protecting human health and the environment and ensuring that we do not shut down America’s industrial base, does not need to be a binary choice,” the EPA said in an emailed statement to Newsday. The agency did not respond to questions about how the present limit hinders industry.

Several business groups, including those representing home builders, farmers and developers, welcomed the rollback of regulations, saying it would reduce burdens on their businesses and help lower costs for consumers.

Marty Durbin, senior vice president of policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement the group supported a more balanced approach to regulation that would “support greater economic growth.”

“American businesses were crippled with an unprecedented regulatory onslaught during the previous administration that contributed to higher costs felt by families around the country,” he said.

American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said in a statement he was pleased to see the Trump administration furthering many of the group’s policy priorities, which will “advance American energy dominance” and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources.

Critics, however, said the expected reversal on particle pollution is one of dozens of rollbacks under Zeldin that will cause serious harm to the planet’s natural places and its climate.

Zeldin has laid out a plan to repeal the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases, known as the endangerment finding. He has terminated hundreds of grants for mitigating pollution in low-income communities, ended oversight of methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and invited coal- and oil-burning power plants to apply for exemptions from limits on mercury pollution.

He also has eliminated the agency’s scientific research branch and is on track to cut roughly a third of EPA jobs overall by the end of the year. Last week, the EPA proposed to rescind federal protection from millions of acres of wetlands and several measures to weaken the Endangered Species Act, moves applauded by groups representing developers, ranchers and the mining and fossil fuel industries.

Local and not-so-local sources

Once airborne, particulate matter can travel thousands of miles. Prevailing winds carry it from wildfires in Canadian forests, as Long Islanders discovered two summers ago, when the air was thick with an orange haze, and from coal plants in the South and Midwest.

“New York doesn’t have the coal-fired power plants that you see in Indiana and Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky. But you’re getting all their pollution,” Walke said.

And there are significant local sources as well. Long Island’s power plants and incinerators, vehicles on its heavily trafficked highways and ships in seaside harbors all emit fine particle pollution.

Climate Trace, an international coalition of nonprofits and scientists that tracks particle emissions worldwide, has identified five “super emitters” on Long Island. These five facilities are in the top 10% of particle polluters among the 660 million sources across the globe for which they’ve compiled data: the Holtsville power plant (103.28 tons of PM2.5 in 2024), Port Jefferson Harbor (87.9 tons), Wading River/Shoreham power plant (74.07 tons), Northport electricity plant (68.76 tons) and topping the list, Greenport Harbor (117.68 tons of PM 2.5).

The figures for the two harbors are calculated by adding emissions from ferries and other boats that come and go from that port, Climate Trace explained: “Frequent domestic vessel traffic can also contribute significantly.”

“Long Island, where our power plants reside, is in compliance with the current PM2.5 air quality standard measured by the NYSDEC,” Molly Gilson, a spokesperson for National Grid, which owns the three power plants, wrote in an email to Newsday. “Any relaxation of the standard would not result in any change of our operations.”

Data collected from the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s monitoring sites — at Babylon, Holtsville and Eisenhower Park — show the annual averages for 2022 through 2024 varied between 5.5 and 7.8 micrograms per cubic meter, below the new federal standard.

If the data showed the pollutant exceeded the federal standard, the state would be required to develop a plan to come into compliance “as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for the DEC wrote in an email to Newsday.

Federal limits on particle pollution have been progressively tightened over the past 30 years, as evidence accumulated that chronic exposure even at low levels increases the risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological disease, among other health problems.

Stronger regulations have led to significantly cleaner air across the United States and on Long Island, according to Loren Dempsey, an assistant professor of nursing at Molloy University who works with adolescents with lung disorders. And that has led to better lung health: Dempsey said asthma hospitalizations have dropped as air quality has improved.

But Dempsey warned that more frequent and more intense wildfires — driven by climate change — have begun to reverse these gains. “We need stronger protections, not less protection, right now,” she said.

Medical research prompted tightened standard

Particulate matter is regulated under the Clean Air Act, which requires the EPA to set limits for any pollutant that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The standard governs ambient air, not emissions from individual facilities, and is intended to limit particle pollution to a level that is safe to breathe.

Thirty years ago, the health standard for PM2.5 was set at 15 micrograms per cubic meter — the limit for the pollutant measured in ambient air — averaged over the course of a year. For a 24-hour period, the limit was set at 65 micrograms per cubic meter. Since then, the standard has been tightened several times, and those regulations have had tangible results: Since 2000, annual PM2.5 emissions nationwide have decreased by 37%, according to EPA data.

Recent research has suggested that the standard was still too high. Scientists once believed that at very low levels, “PM2.5 is not really toxic anymore,” said Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University’s public health program. “But increasingly research is showing that’s not the case.”

Last year, after considering three possible annual standards — 10, 9 and 8 micrograms per cubic meter — the EPA chose the middle path, lowering the annual health standard from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter. The EPA’s analysis concluded that the new standard would prevent 3,200 to 5,700 deaths per year beginning in 2032, when states would be expected to come into compliance.

Dozens of industry groups, including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Chemistry Council, argued the new standard “would risk jobs and livelihoods by making it even more difficult to obtain permits for new factories, facilities and infrastructure to power economic growth” and filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the rule.

Representatives for those groups didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Zeldin, who has maintained that the agency can protect the environment while easing regulations, has said the EPA’s actions, including on particle pollution, would “undo red tape” and reduce costs.

But those concerns, according to Walke, are not proper legal considerations in creating federal health standards. An unanimous 2001 Supreme Court decision ruled that the Clean Air Act “unambiguously bars cost considerations from the [air quality standard]-setting process,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion for the court.

Any rollback Zeldin may propose would have to go through the same extensive rulemaking process that led to the tightened standard last year. Laura Kate Bender, head of public policy at the American Lung Association, said it will be hard for the EPA to argue that a looser standard would be equally protective of public health.

“There is no way that particle pollution is somehow less harmful than was thought previously,” she said.
”These standards under the Clean Air Act have dramatically reduced levels of these common outdoor air pollutants, and made people healthier as a result … The challenge is that there’s still work to do.”