In the Eyes of Trump’s EPA, Human Health Is Now Literally Worthless |
The EPA plans to stop calculating the value of the health benefits of air pollution regulations but still tally the costs to industry.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty via Vox
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations.
Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life.
In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns—usually referred to as PM2.5—and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.”
So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another........