EPA will no longer consider value of human health benefits in setting air pollution rules
The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer calculate the monetary value of saving human lives, among other health impacts, when setting new clean air rules.
The agency quietly debuted this updated approach to weighing the costs and benefits of two air pollutants - small particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers or smaller, called PM 2.5, and ozone - in a preliminary version of a new final rule for power plant emissions published late last week on the agency’s website.
In the notice, the agency said that its past valuations of the benefit of avoided deaths and illnesses from cutting pollution were too uncertain. “To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone,” it said. The agency is still considering the costs to industry of complying with the rules.
This change represents a radical departure from how the nation’s top environmental regulator has long conducted these so-called cost-benefit analyses for dangerous air pollutants. The new approach was first reported by the New York Times.
The EPA said it is still considering the impacts of PM2.5 and ozone on human health. But it’s not assigning a monetary value to them at this time.
“Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact. EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protect[ing] human health and the environment,” Carolyn Holran, an agency spokesperson, wrote in an emailed statement.
Former EPA officials and environmental groups decried the move, arguing that the agency is abandoning its central responsibility.
“Air pollution rules exist to protect human health and the environment. That is the entire mission of the EPA,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the nonprofit Evergreen Action, in a statement. “This decision will make people sicker, make communities less safe, do nothing to lower skyrocketing utility bills and lead to more preventable deaths.”
The agency’s justification for the new approach is detailed on page 215 of the final power plant rule. EPA’s past “analytical practices often provided the public with a false sense of precision and more confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) and ozone than the underlying science could fully support, especially as overall emissions have significantly decreased, and impacts have become more uncertain,” per the notice. As the agency foregoes putting a value to these impacts for now, officials “will continue to quantify the emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
Joseph Goffman, former President Joe Biden’s assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in an email to Bloomberg News that the agency could provide a range of estimates to help express its uncertainty, something it has done in the past. “The current claim that there is too much uncertainty in calculating the monetary value of reducing fine particles is just the latest strategy” deployed by industry and past officials to downplay the benefits of slashing these pollutants, he said.
The US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group, has previously critiqued the agency’s approach to cost-benefit analyses. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new change.
The change is part of the Trump administration’s broader environmental rollback. Last week, the president withdrew the US from multiple prominent UN bodies focused on global warming, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Trump’s EPA is also expected to soon finalize a rule that would rescind the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollution.