The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer consider how much pollution costs to human health or the amount of lives saved when setting air pollution rules, according to a report by the New York Times. Instead, it will ignore benefits and only consider costs in its cost-benefit analyses.
The change is specific to two pollutants which heavily harm human health: PM2.5 and Ozone. PM2.5 are the smallest particulate pollutants which can easily penetrate and damage your lungs and other organs and Ozone is formed from several gases produced in fossil fuel combustion and goes on to form smog.
Both of them have huge health impacts, restricting opportunities, decreasing enjoyment of life, and causing earlier death.
And those health impacts are therefore economic impacts – the sicker a population is, the more healthcare it needs to seek, the more time is lost to sick days and disease, the fewer productive years it will have.
So, it makes sense to calculate these impacts, as the EPA long has. Regulations are generally accompanied by a calculation of how much money and lives they will save, like President Biden’s EPA rules which, all told, would save Americans $250B/yr and 200k lives thanks to their clean air effects.
And then, it makes sense to compare those positive impacts with the cost of compliance. Everything in life has cost-benefit analyses, comparing the amount of effort required to the expected result. If the result is better than the effort required to attain it, then it’s generally a good idea to do the thing.
For example, Biden’s EPA said $77 of health benefits could come from every $1 spent in reducing PM2.5 from industrial plants.
But then, what if your fossil fuel masters don’t want you to do that?
Well, that’s the calculation that Lee Zeldin, chief saboteur of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from fossil fuels over his political career, has committed to doing.
In upcoming regulations, EPA will now consider the value of a human life as zero. Yes, you read that right: according to the current squatters in the White House, your life is literally worth nothing.
Instead, only the costs of compliance will be considered.
EPA claims that the reason for this is because estimates on the value of human life are too wide to be considered, and thus it won’t use them in calculations whatsoever. Historically, EPA estimates have varied as to the value of human life, but a life has never been counted as being worth nothing.
But it’s not the only way that the EPA is trying to harm you. It’s expected to finalize a regulation within days that deletes climate science from government findings, which will cost Americans $100 billion, raise gas prices by .76/gallon and kill thousands, despite massive public opposition to the plan.
As with most of the EPA’s recent moves, this will likely result in legal challenges. Even the most conservative judges have argued that both costs and benefits must be considered in setting regulations, so to ignore benefits entirely flies in the face of accepted administrative procedures.
And there’s a reasonable chance it gets overturned in court – just yesterday, two DoE moves to make energy more expensive by shutting down wind power and canceling EV grants were reversed by courts.
And it makes it clear once again that the squatters in the White House have no interest in your life, or in lowering your costs, and rather only want to channel more of your hard-earned wealth to the industries that are actively trying to poison you.
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