EPA Cooks The Books On Industrial Pollution Costs

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Question: How can you tell people in the current US administration are lying? Answer: Their lips are moving. That’s what is happening this week as the Environmental Destruction Agency begins the next phase of kowtowing to the nation’s biggest polluters.

A report by Maxine Joselow of the New York Times points out that officials hyper-partisan lap dogs at the agency have announced they will no longer compute the economic toll of air pollution on actual human beings — the ones the theoretically are supposed to be protecting — when calculating the economic cost of industrial pollution.

Instead, they will henceforth consider only the economic cost of the regulations to corporations, and if they are deemed to be too burdensome, those regulations will be softened in order to avoid undue economic harm to the polluters. If you think this sounds like criminals being able to determine their own punishment, you are not far wrong.

Fine Particulates & Ozone

What sort of pollution are we talking about here? Fine particulates, for one. Those are the microscopically small — 2.5 microns or less — that form whenever fossil fuels are burned. Particles that small can cross directly into the blood stream in the lungs, contributing to cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, lower cognitive functioning, and a variety of other health ailments. The young and the old are particularly vulnerable, as are people who live in the immediate vicinity of extraction operations, refineries, industrial facilities, and chemical factories.

The other pollutant that will no longer be assigned a monetary value is ozone, a smog-causing gas that forms when nitrogen dioxide and volatile organic compounds are emitted from power plants, factories, and vehicles and then mix in the air on hot, sunny days. Some scientists describe ozone as giving a sunburn to the inside of human lungs. Long term exposure to both pollutants is linked to asthma, heart and lung disease, and premature death. Even moderate exposure to fine particulates can damage the lungs as much as smoking does.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine, told The Guardian. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

Do you think this administration cares a flying fig leaf about children, the elderly, the working poor, or people or color? Not hardly. It cares about corporations that make enormous campaign contributions and little else.

Fossil Fuel Crud Kills Millions Every Year

A study by researchers at Harvard, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London and published in the journal Environmental Research found that exposure to fine particulate matter from fossil fuel emissions accounted for 18% of total global deaths in 2018.

That amounts to about 8.7 million deaths — nearly double the number suggested by previous studies. That is more deaths worldwide than from smoking and malaria combined. Regions with the highest concentrations of fossil fuel related air pollution — Eastern North America, Europe, and South East Asia — have the highest rates of mortality.

In an email to the New York Times, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran said the agency is still weighing the health effects of fine particulates and ozone, but won’t be assigning them a dollar value in its cost-benefit analyses. “Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact,” she said.

Well, actually, Carolyn, it kinda does. As Al Gore told us years ago, things in this life that have no assigned monetary value are assumed to have no value and that’s exactly the point of this change. The MAGAnistas want to devalue human life any way they can in order to keep those corporate donations flowing. It’s pretty straightforward, when you think about it. It’s enough to make Don Corleone proud.

A Proper Cost-Benefit Analysis

According to Emily Atkin at HEATED, “In regulatory cost-benefit analysis, monetization is how harms are weighed, compared, and justified. If the EPA refuses to assign a dollar value to the illnesses and deaths caused by air pollution, those harms cannot influence the outcome of the rule. And if they cannot influence the outcome, they may as well not exist for policy purposes.”

“Make no mistake — this is air pollution denial, a phenomenon the Trump administration has been advancing since 2017. It has taken different forms over the years — Attacking the science linking particulate pollution to premature death, minimizing the harms, arguing the evidence was too uncertain to justify federal policy. But the goal was always the same: to stop regulatory agencies from treating air pollution as a public health problem. The [agency] has now reached that endpoint.”

Atkin adds that Republicans have argued for decades that Democrats overvalue health benefits to justify regulation, while Democrats have argued that Republicans undervalue health benefits to make regulation look unnecessary. “But both sides have always agreed the EPA has to make some calculation of health benefits. In the past, there has had to be some semblance of adhering to that mission, no matter which party held power.”

“That is what makes the Trump administration’s approach so stark. Rather than argue over how to calculate the health benefits of reducing pollution, it has chosen not to calculate them at all. In a way, it’s almost refreshing; at least they’re not pretending the EPA works for anyone but the industries who funded Trump’s campaign.”

“The idea that EPA would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of EPA,” Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law told Joselow.

“If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits, then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that EPA was set up,” he said.

Legal Precedent

James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, said the move seemed to ignore the 2015 Supreme Court case Michigan v. EPA. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in that case, in which he said that if an agency considers the benefits of a regulation, it must also consider the costs, and vice versa. “Scalia was making the point that you can’t judge a regulation’s reasonableness just by looking at one side of the ledger,” he said.

Antonin Scalia is a god in conservative circles, so it will be interesting to see how the new three horsemen of the MAGA apocolyse — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Bryant — will honor him in spirit while overturning the Michigan Vs EPA decision. Alito and Thomas have already reached their decision and Chief Justice John Roberts will bend himself into a pretzel to honor his old mentor while stabbing him in the back.

Whether it is clean air, clean water, access to affordable health insurance, or equal opportunities for all, this administration is running roughshod over the people of the United States and it will not stop until it has subjugated every one of them for the greater glory of the corporate kleptocracy. “We the people” is now an irrelevant concept and the corporate takeover of America is very nearly complete.