Scott Pruitt was the man that got the Koch brothers behind the Donald Trump presidency. Their guy heading up the EPA? That means loosening up of regulations, changing of permissible pollutants, and if they're really lucky, the freeing up of national lands for drilling.

Let Trump grandstand and be a national embarrassment on the world's stage. Let him grift as much as he wants. Let him kill the GOP for the foreseeable future. Hell, let Scott Pruitt be a one man scandal machine. The Kochs get their tax cuts and none of those pesky regulations that a President Hillary Clinton would have enforced. Nothing else matters, right?

A new essay from two Harvard University scientists concluded that the Trump administration’s environmental policies could result in an additional 80,000 deaths per decade.

The research, from public health economist David Cutler and biostatistician Francesca Dominici, pointed specifically to the health impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) policies on air pollutants and toxic chemicals.

“This sobering statistic captures only a small fraction of the cumulative public health damages associated with the full range of rollbacks and systemic actions proposed by the Trump administration,” the scientists said.

The essay was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association as a commentary, not a formal peer-reviewed paper, but it uses the EPA’s own data to make its argument.

The EPA, obviously, denies this claim and like every other Trump department, accuses the authors of being political, not scientific.