EPA stops assigning dollar value to lives in clean-air rule analyses

The Environmental Protection Agency has stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two widespread air pollutants, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone, effectively treating those benefits as worth zero dollars in cost-benefit analyses. Last week the agency said it would calculate only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations and would not tabulate the economic benefits of reducing PM2.5 and ozone "until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts." An E.P.A.

spokeswoman, Brigit Hirsch, said, "We’re not putting a dollar value on those impacts right now. That does not mean E.P.A. is ignoring or undervaluing them," and added that "dollars and cents don’t define their worth." Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford, said in an email that the change meant "the Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life." The move departs from decades of practice: for about 30 years the E.P.A.

had pegged the value of a statistical life at roughly $11.7 million, a metric agencies used to show the benefits of clean-air rules often dwarfed costs by at least 30-to-1.

Key Topics

Politics, Environmental Protection Agency, Ozone, Clean Air Act, Statistical Life Value, Trump Administration