Trump’s EPA Found a Sneaky New Way to Make Our Air More Polluted

*“In the second year of this term, the Trump administration has shifted gears, taking another legally indefensible approach that is less visible but even more pernicious because it extends to all pollutants, not just greenhouse gases. The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking. The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty. And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.*

*The EPA announced its new approach in January in a rule on emissions from gas turbines, stating that it would no longer value public-health benefits from reducing fine particulate matter and ozone—two of the most prevalent and damaging air pollutants. The agency referenced uncertainties in how different concentrations of pollutants translate into negative health impacts like premature deaths; uncertainties in mortality valuations, which assign a dollar value to these deaths; and uncertainties in growth and discount rates, which are used to translate future impacts to present values. But the EPA’s longstanding techniques already accounted for these uncertainties.*
*As a result of its new approach, the EPA no longer estimates the number of lives saved or diseases and hospitalizations averted. It is assigning no value whatsoever to these environmental benefits, thereby ignoring the very health concerns the agency was created to address.”*