Among the triumphs of the creation of the Nixon-era Environmental Protection Agency was that it set in motion a process that tried to balance the demands of industry with restoring nature and protecting human health. Now, in a key area, the E.P.A. has stopped estimating the dollar value of lives saved in the cost-benefit analyses for new pollution rules.
This month, the E.P.A. announced that it was ending the practice of measuring human-health costs, including medical care, when regulating fossil fuel-driven electric plants. The shift means the agency will review limits on “fine particulate matter” and ozone on the dollar cost to industry alone. People will be left out of the equation.
A bulletin formalizing the change mentions human health just five times in a 55-page document but refers to cost more than 150 times. The E.P.A. has said that it “absolutely remains committed to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment” but “will not be monetizing the impacts at this time.” Its excuse? That a specific estimate of human health costs “leads the public to believe the Agency has a better understanding of the monetized impacts of exposure to PM2.5 and ozone than in reality.”
Translated into plain English, the E.P.A. is saying that rather than trying to improve the calculations, it was dropping the effort altogether — for those who remember the reference, this brings to mind the infamous talking Barbie doll that exclaimed, “Math class is tough!”
Weakening the E.P.A. has long been a goal of industry lobbyists in Washington. The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 is the Trump administration’s policy bible, is heavily supported by oil and gas money. Among Project 2025’s aims is to reverse a policy that conceded that carbon dioxide emissions were dangerous to human health, which blocks most federal regulation of a potent greenhouse gas. It also has pushed to eliminate independent health research in writing pollution-control policy.
Meanwhile, the E.P.A. also plans to limit states’ and Native American tribes’ power under the Clean Water Act to block major projects like natural gas pipelines. This also would be done with the goal of advancing the Trump administration’s acceleration of new fossil fuel electric plants and power-gobbling data centers.
In his 1970 State of the Union address, President Nixon asked, “shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?” Unfortunately, this is a question that remains unanswered today.