Particulate Matters: Trump EPA Deregulatory Science, Fossil Fuels, and Racist Regimes of Breathing

Particulate matter (a key contributor to poor air quality) was central to the most far-reaching deregulatory actions of the Trump EPA and as such became a key mechanism through which fossil fuels saturate and racialise deregulatory knowledge. This article introduces particulate matter as a problem of fossil fuel combustion and leading cause of death that-given well-known racial disparities in exposure-is at the heart of today's racist politics of breathing. It then traces particulate matter through the Trump EPA's efforts to remake regulatory science, including through expansive measures not directly about air quality. It is not just that particulate matter is an effect of deregulation but that it served as a mechanism for a wider deregulatory apparatus. The article then elaborates on the significance of particulate matter in the suffocating nature of racism to argue that these actions entrench racist calculations of whose lives matter within the EPA's regulatory apparatus.