EPA to stop calculating money and lives saved by curbs on air pollution | Trump administration

The Environmental Protection Agency says it will stop calculating how much money will be saved in avoided health costs and averted deaths from air pollution rules that limit two deadly pollutants.

The change means the EPA will focus fine particulate matter and ozone rules solely on cost to industry, part of a broader realignment under Donald Trump toward a business-friendly approach that has included rolling back several policies intended to protect human health and the environment and slow climate change.

The agency said in a statement Monday that it “remains absolutely committed to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment” but “will not monetize impacts at this time.” The EPA will continue to estimate the costs to businesses of complying with the rules and continue “its ongoing work to refine its economic methodologies” for pollution rules, spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said.

Environmental and public health advocates called the agency’s action a dangerous abdication of one of its core missions.

“EPA’s mandate is to protect public health, not to ignore science in order to eliminate air quality protections that save lives,” said John Walke, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He called the change in how public health benefits are calculated “reckless, dangerous and illegal,” adding: “By pretending that actual health benefits don’t matter, the EPA wants to open the door for industry to pollute the air, while communities and families pay the price in asthma attacks, heart disease and premature deaths.” »

The change in how the EPA calculates health benefits was first reported by The New York Times.

The move comes as the Trump administration seeks to scrap a rule that sets strict standards for deadly soot pollution, arguing that the Biden administration lacked the authority to set stricter standards for pollution from tailpipes, smokestacks and other industrial sources.

In a court filing filed in November, the EPA said the Biden-era rule was implemented “without the rigorous, step-by-step process required by Congress” and was therefore illegal.

The EPA said it continues to recognize the “clear and well-documented benefits” of reducing fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, and ozone.

“Failing to monetize is NOT the same as failing to consider or value the impact on human health,” Hirsch said in an emailed statement, asserting that the agency led by its administrator, Lee Zeldin, remains committed to protecting human health.

Since the EPA’s creation more than 50 years ago, Republican and Democratic administrations have used different estimates to assign a monetary value to a human life in cost-benefit analyses.

Under Biden, the EPA estimated that its proposed PM2.5 rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost work days by 2032. For every dollar spent to reduce PM2.5, the agency said, there could be up to $77 in health benefits.

But the Trump administration says those estimates are misleading. By failing to include ranges or other qualifying statements, EPA’s use of an estimate “leads the public to believe that the Agency has a better understanding of the monetary impacts of exposure to PM2.5 and ozone than it actually does,” the agency said in an economic impact analysis of the new rule.

“Therefore, to rectify this error, EPA is no longer monetizing the benefits of PM2.5 and ozone, but will continue to quantify emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize these impacts.”

The United States has made substantial progress in reducing PM2.5 and ozone concentrations since 2000, the agency said.

But, critics say, a new EPA rule that revises emission limits for hazardous nitrogen oxide pollution from new gas turbines used in power plants demonstrates the risks of this new approach.

Nitrogen oxide emissions, also known as NOx, form smog and soot that are harmful to human health and linked to serious heart and lung diseases. The EPA’s final NOx rule, released Monday, is significantly less restrictive than a proposal from the Biden administration. For some gas plants, the rule weakens protections that have been in place for two decades.

The new rule does not estimate the economic value of health benefits resulting from reductions in NOx and other types of air pollution under the Clean Air Act. Critics said the change meant the EPA would ignore the economic value of lives saved, hospital visits avoided, and lost work and school days avoided.

Under Trump, the EPA “recklessly refuses to place any value on protecting the health of millions of Americans from nitrogen oxide pollution, when mountains of medical knowledge conclude that this pollution contributes to asthma attacks, heart disease and other serious health problems,” said Noha Haggag, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, another environmental group.