Buried in an economic impact analysis for a rule released earlier this week, the EPA made an important decision that will reverberate throughout many of the major rules regarding the six criteria pollutants, especially ozone and particulate matter, that the EPA regulates. Among the many ways that the current EPA is trying to inject rationality back into its regulatory processes, this change ranks high on the list and deserves some extra attention.
For decades, the EPA has attempted to quantify the monetary cost of early deaths and increased asthma attacks due to air pollution, even though the scientific data linking the low levels of pollution currently experienced in the U.S. to adverse health effects is extremely tenuous. The supposed health benefits from reducing emissions of particulate matter and ozone comprise most of the quantified benefits in many of the EPA’s most impactful rules, most of which do not even regulate those pollutants.
In its recent rulemaking regarding gas combustion turbine permitting (an important piece of regulation for new data centers), the EPA quietly announced that it will end this practice. As the economic impact analysis notes, the EPA often acknowledged “significant uncertainties related to monetized … impacts” but then provided single estimates of those impacts, often in the form of the falsely precise measure of “benefits per ton.” It would then multiply that highly uncertain estimate by the quantity of emissions reductions to obtain what were often tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in health benefits from its regulations.
The Life:Powered team has been writing about this problem for many years, and others have been pointing out these flaws for decades. Yet, the public only sees the mainstream media dutifully reporting the massive benefits numbers with no mention of the uncertainties. Administrator Lee Zeldin deserves immense credit for trying, as no EPA administrator before him has tried, to put an end to this politically motivated practice and finally make truth in advertising part of the EPA’s modus operandi.
To provide a sense of how the EPA has abused this “science,” consider the claim in its 2024 rule regulating carbon emissions from power plants that reductions in particulate matter and ozone resulting from the rule (the EPA calls these secondary effects “co-benefits”) would save over 500 lives a year with a monetized annual benefit of $100 billion over 20 years. That staggering monetary benefit is based on nationwide emissions reductions of less than 1% for each of those two pollutants.
But what the EPA doesn’t say is that these “lives saved” are just guesses based on the assumption that unattributed cardiovascular deaths are largely due to air pollution. The EPA has never established true causality in this area and relies on a mere handful of very flawed studies to derive its estimates. And the monetary value of each statistical life is an average that is best applied to relatively healthy people, not the people who are likely at risk of dying from cardiovascular issues. The list of uncertainties goes on from there.
Of course, the media continues to misreport this story to further their preferred narrative that the air in America is dangerously polluted and that we must stop burning fossil fuels to save lives. The EPA has fueled this narrative, and justified growing its regulatory reach, by pretending that it can quantify the number of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by barely measurable reductions in air pollution.
Contrary to the reporting, the EPA is still considering the health benefits of reducing air pollution. It is simply not ascribing a monetary value to those benefits and equating that phantom value to the real and quantifiable costs of its regulations. This is a long overdue return to proper scientific accounting, carefully noting what is more certain and less certain instead of treating all risks, no matter how small, as known and quantifiable in order to justify regulating those risks.
The problem with the EPA’s efforts to correct the prior abuses of emissions regulations is that its actions are subject to the whim of the president and endless litigation in the courts because Congress has left the Clean Air Act largely untouched since 1990. Just as President Biden reversed much of what President Trump did before him, and President Trump reversed many of President Obama’s regulations in his first term, this policy could be easily reversed by a new president in 2029.
There is more momentum on permitting reform in Congress now than there has been in at least a generation, with the SPEED Act to reform the National Environmental Policy Act and the PERMIT Act to reform the Clean Water Act both passing the House on bipartisan votes. Congress should also put effort into reforming the Clean Air Act to rein in the EPA’s excesses once and for all.
