The Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to stop quantifying the health benefits of regulating soot and ozone is a victory for polluters and a loss for the public. Masking the benefits will make it easier for the EPA to defend lax regulations on toxic emissions but harder to make America healthy again. More people will get sick and die, and the EPA will bear some of the blame.
For decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the EPA has conducted cost-benefit analyses of its air-pollution regulations. Fewer asthma attacks, for instance, produce lower medical costs, less missed work and higher productivity rates. Those economic benefits are given a dollar value that can be placed beside the costs that businesses incur complying with the regulations.
Such analysis is routine among government agencies, yet the EPA claims that past calculations have “often provided the public with false precision and confidence” regarding the monetary value of the health benefits. It’s true that determining their dollar value is an inexact science, and it’s fair to debate what variables belong in the formulas, how calculations should be drawn up and what caveats or ranges should accompany the findings. But it’s foolish to walk away from the exercise entirely.
Exposure to PM2.5, fine particulate matter more commonly known as soot, is associated with asthma, heart disease, lung cancer and other serious illnesses, as well as dementia in seniors and low birth weight in babies — all of which carry economic costs. As the State Department’s website currently notes, “The World Bank found that air pollution costs the U.S. economy over $790 billion per year or approximately 5% of our GDP in economic welfare losses.”
The EPA maintains that it will continue to consider the health benefits of soot and ozone regulations, just not monetarily. But dropping the dollar value of the benefits will have the effect of highlighting only the dollar value of the costs. Not only does the public deserve to see the two side by side, but policymakers ought to be considering both sides of the balance sheet in determining the proper scope of regulations.