The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to announce new regulations governing soot — the particles that trucks, farms, factories, wildfires, power plants and dusty roads generate. By law, the agency isn’t supposed to consider the impact on polluting industries. In practice, it does — and those industries are warning of dire economic consequences.

Under the Clean Air Act, every five years, the EPA reexamines the science around several harmful pollutants. Fine particulate matter, for example, is extremely dangerous when it percolates into human lungs, and the law has driven a vast decline in concentrations.

But technically, there is no safe level of particulate matter, and ever-spreading wildfire smoke driven by a changing climate and decades of forest mismanagement has reversed recent progress. The Biden administration decided to short-circuit the review cycle after the EPA in the Trump administration concluded that no change was needed. As the decision nears, business groups are ramping up resistance.

Last month, a coalition of major industries, including mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, and timber, sent a letter to the White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, warning that “no room would be left for new economic development” in many areas if the EPA went ahead with a standard as tough as it was contemplating, endangering the manufacturing recovery that President Joe Biden had pushed with laws funding climate action and infrastructure investment.

Twenty years ago, generating electric power caused far higher soot emissions, so “there was room” to tighten air quality standards, Chad Whiteman, vice president of environment and regulatory affairs at the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, said in an interview. “Now, we’re down to the point where the costs are extremely high,” he said.

Research shows that in the first decades after the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1967, the rules lowered output and employment, as well as productivity, in pollution-intensive industries. That’s why the cost of those rules has often drawn industry protests. This time, steel and aluminum producers have voiced particularly strong objections, with one company predicting that a tighter standard would “greatly diminish the possibility” that it could restart a smelter in Kentucky that it idled in 2022 because of high energy prices.

New factories, however, tend to have much more effective pollution control systems. That’s especially true for two advanced manufacturing industries that the Biden administration has specifically encouraged: semiconductors and solar panel manufacturing.

Regardless, public health advocates argue that the averted deaths, illnesses and lost productivity that air pollution caused far outweigh the cost.

The EPA pegs the potential benefits at as much as $55 billion by 2032 if it drops the limit to 9 micrograms per cubic meter, from the current 12 micrograms.