The Gavin Power Plant on the Ohio River in Cheshire, Ohio, is fired by coal. (Photo provided — Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s the tradeoff: People, fish and forests will die, and it will be expensive to treat the extra asthma attacks and heart attacks. But coal companies and power plants that burn coal will get a boost in profitability.

Also, it will officially become acceptable to dump toxic garbage on your neighbors’ heads, even though federal law forbids it.

That’s how we see the decision of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week when Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with the new Affordable Clean Energy Rule. He was, as he said, “fulfilling the president’s agenda.”

The new plan is misnamed: It should not have “clean” in its title, nor “affordable” due to the extra expenses it will incur on the public to benefit a few.

Like the Clean Power Plan, this new rule is an executive order, as opposed to the Clean Air Act, which is a law passed by Congress and cannot simply be undone from one president to the next. Nevertheless, the new rule would let states bypass the Clean Air Act’s “good neighbor” provision, which requires the EPA to stop smog emitted in one state from causing harm to residents of any other state. This breach is a huge concern to us here in the Adirondacks. New York has strong clean air regulations, but states in the Ohio River Valley and Midwest are likely to let dirty coal smoke flow freely. They ignore its consequences because its pollutants don’t fall on them. The emissions blow east with the prevailing winds, and when they hit mountains such as the Adirondacks, they dump those chemicals in rain or snow.

This is why we have federal rules for damage that crosses state lines. We expect states will sue the EPA over this, and they deserve to win.

In the Adirondacks, the danger this poses is obvious to people of all political parties. Acid rain here had gotten particularly bad by the 1980s. Hundreds of Adirondack lakes and ponds were dead, with nothing living in them, and forests were dead as well. Congress’ 1990 update of the Clean Air Act turned things around, and now those lakes and ponds are full of living fish.

But that recovery depends on federal regulation and enforcement. President Donald Trump’s EPA has already lost lawsuits for willfully not upholding existing rules — for instance, not ordering power plants to turn on emission-control devices they had already installed. Now the EPA wants to institutionalize that laxity and also lower pollution standards.

You don’t have to live in the Adirondacks to see the damage this change will bring. The EPA acknowledges, deep in at 289-page scientific analysis of the new rule, that if it’s still in place by 2030, it will cause between 470 and 1,400 people to die prematurely each year. That’s because it would increase microscopic airborne particulates linked to heart and lung disease, asthma and bronchitis.

We were glad to see northern New York’s representative in Congress, Elise Stefanik, break with her fellow Republican president to oppose this pollution overhaul. We agree with her statement that “This rollback will have a detrimental impact on the significant progress we have made in combating the impacts of acid rain in the Adirondacks.” Stefanik has not always stood up to the coal industry to protect the Adirondacks, but she has been better about it in her second term. Presumably she is responding to how voters in her district feel about this issue.

We wish she could have gotten through to the president when she hosted him recently at Fort Drum. Trump, at a rally last week in West Virginia, said, “I want clean air. I want crystal clean water, and we’ve got it. We’ve got the cleanest country in the planet right now. … But I’m getting rid of some of these ridiculous rules and regulations, which are killing our companies … and our jobs.”

Even if one accepts the unsupported boast that “We’ve got the cleanest country in the planet right now,” it’s important to understand that federal rules are what saved our air and water from the dirtiest days of the 1950s and ’60s. Take that away, and we backslide.

Reducing the well-documented damage done by coal-burning power plants is the most basic and obvious kind of environmental protection. Yes, it has a cost, which should be borne by those that pollute. Our country has come a long way on this issue, but now, sadly, we are turning back the clock — choosing big business over the health of people, plants and animals.