Very depressing news. The EPA plans to NOT take into account of the value of human life any more when making rules and setting policy regarding air pollutants (e.g., fine particulate matter and ozone). Meaning that the value of a human life is zero dollars. Instead, the only thing that will be considered is the cost to businesses of pollution regulations.
In other words, no more estimates of the dollar value of lives saved in the cost-benefit analyses for new pollution rules. People dying will just be a side-effect of business - eh, move on, nothing to see here.
This means that the cost to society (of human suffering and deaths) from pollutants just doesn't matter. Businesses obviously do not/will not want regulations that cost money. Yes, this will mean dirtier air and the environment going forward. Very depressing...
Excerpts from NY Times: Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars
Government officials have long grappled with a question that seems like the purview of philosophers: What is the value of a human life?
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the answer has been in the millions of dollars. The higher the value, the more the government has required businesses to spend on their operations to prevent a single death.
But for the first time ever, at the Environmental Protection Agency the answer is effectively zero dollars.
Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, said in an email. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
It’s a drastic change to the way the government weighs the costs of curbing air pollution against the benefits to public health and the environment. It could lead to looser controls on pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial sites across the country, resulting in dirtier air.
And it appears to shelve a powerful tool, known as the value of a statistical life, that agencies have used for decades in the cost-benefit analyses that justify new regulations.
The E.P.A. has used the tool to assign a dollar value to the lives saved by clean-air rules, causing the benefits of these rules to dwarf the costs by at least a 30-to-1 ratio. That has allowed it to defend pollution controls that companies would otherwise challenge as too costly.
Other federal agencies have used the metric to justify regulations affecting everything from safety features on cars to cancer warning labels on cigarette packs.
For the past 30 years, the E.P.A. has pegged the value of a statistical life at around $11.7 million. Although experts have recommended increasing the value, the agency has updated the metric only to account for inflation and wage growth.
Some critics have raised moral objections to using the tool at all, saying a human life is priceless. But supporters say its use has helped prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, which kills more Americans each year than vehicle crashes.
The biggest driver of those deaths is fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which refers to particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, small enough to enter the bloodstream. Another silent killer is ozone, a smog-causing gas that forms when emissions from power plants, factories and vehicles mix in the air on hot, sunny days.
A robust body of research has linked long-term exposure to both pollutants to premature death as well as asthma, dementia, and heart and lung disease. Even moderate exposure to PM2.5 can damage the lungs about as much as smoking, studies show.
But in a document posted online on Monday, the E.P.A. claimed that the economic benefits of reducing PM2.5 and ozone were too uncertain. The E.P.A. said that it would stop tabulating these benefits “until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970. Steep reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the average American’s life expectancy since 1970, according to research by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index project.
“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Dr. Greenstone said. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”