Opinion | Trump EPA ignores health harms of air pollution

What is the value of a human life? According to the Trump administration, the answer is $0.

At least when it comes to deaths caused by air pollution.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to stop assigning a dollar value to the health harms of air pollution in agency assessments of the costs and benefits of federal air quality regulation. If implemented in EPA rulemaking going forward, this decision would deprive the American public of vital information about the effects of ongoing deregulatory actions being taken by our government.

Reams of scientific evidence confirm that air pollution is a threat to human health. More than an irritant to our eyes, throats and lungs, common pollutants such as soot and smog cause a host of illnesses, including heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and even metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Air pollution is among the leading environmental risk factors for early death in the United States and worldwide.

It’s because of these well-established health harms that air pollution features so prominently in assessment of the costs and benefits of proposed federal regulation. Even small changes in air pollution — when experienced by millions across the country — can result in substantial health effects. And given the high value that we place on preventing deaths caused by air pollution, the monetized benefits of improving air quality are enormous as well.

By EPA’s own estimation, the monetized benefits of major Clean Air Act rules since 1990 outweigh pollution control costs by a factor of more than 30 to one. There are essentially no policies across all federal regulatory agencies that produce as high a ratio of benefits to costs. In 2020 alone, the benefits of these clean air rules totaled $2 trillion, largely the result of the reduced health harms associated with stricter pollution limits. Compliance costs associated with these rules — which include emission control technologies for power plants, vehicles and other pollution sources — totaled $65 billion in the same year. These costs are felt most acutely by polluting industry, but the air quality improvements benefit us all.

It’s this contrast that makes EPA’s action so brazen. By abandoning its longstanding practice of monetizing public health benefits of air pollution reductions, the agency is tilting its cost–benefit calculus in favor of polluting industry. This is particularly outrageous given evidence suggesting that costs to industry of pollution control measures are often overstated.

The health costs of air pollution continue to be refined as better economic and scientific evidence emerges, but they are decidedly not zero, as the Trump administration now contends. EPA attempts to justify their proposal by pointing to recent regulatory impact analyses that used simplified research methods that cannot provide as robust an estimate of air quality and health effects of regulation as more sophisticated methods that the agency typically uses. This is rich, considering that current EPA leadership is planning to dismantle its Office of Research and Development, so the agency is lamenting a loss of scientific expertise brought on by this administration’s own actions.

This effort is consistent with other ongoing EPA actions to devalue the benefits of regulation. In recent analyses of the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emission reductions from vehicles, the agency assumes that there are no societal benefits of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — the same argument now asserted for criteria air pollution. In reality, just as with air pollution, there is strong scientific evidence linking greenhouse gases to health and economic damages.

The bulk of air pollution in the United States stems from the burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — that the current administration champions over cheaper and cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind. The health burden from our continued reliance on fossil fuels is significant. Research from our group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows that eliminating air pollution emissions in the U.S. energy system could prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths each year.

Air quality in the United States has improved greatly over the last five decades, thanks in large part to the Clean Air Act. We all enjoy healthier and longer lives because of government action to reduce harmful air pollution from power plants, vehicles and industry. These health benefits exist whether EPA tallies them or not.

As this administration makes its deregulatory agenda clearer by the day, we must remember the life-saving achievements that some would rather we forget.

Nicholas Mailloux is a postdoctoral research associate in the Climate Solutions for Health Lab in the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, a research center in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He researches the air quality and health effects of the transition to a clean energy economy.

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