The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will scrap its longstanding practice of calculating the economic benefits related to human health when it sets air pollution limits, according to a recently published rule. Instead, it will only consider the economic costs to industry.
Experts quoted in the media describe the change as worrisome, saying that it could lead to higher levels of air pollution and more sickness and deaths among Americans.
“I’m worried about what this could mean for health,” said Mary Rice, Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Respiratory Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a Jan. 13 NPR article. “Especially for people with chronic respiratory illnesses like asthma and COPD, for kids whose lungs are still developing, and for older people, who are especially susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution on the heart, lungs and the brain.”
The article noted that fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, most of which is emitted by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and vehicles, poses serious health risks. Numerous studies have linked long-term exposure to this type of pollution with problems such as higher asthma rates, more heart attacks, and more dementia—as well as premature death. One of those studies, cited in the NPR article, was the landmark Harvard Six Cities Study, which showed that people living in more polluted areas were sicker and had shorter lives than those in areas with less pollution.
Although the EPA, for decades, has calculated the costs related to the health benefits of reducing air pollution as it weighed potential regulatory changes, it now says it won’t do so because there is too much uncertainty in the estimates.
Rice pointed out that, previously, those estimates tended to show a high economic benefit-to-cost ratio of lowering pollution. “The Clean Air Act is often cited as having benefit-cost ratios of upward of 30 to 1,” she told NPR. “The economic return is so great that even small reductions in pollution, across millions of people, translate into very large savings.”
