"Economists: 'Deep flaws' in Trump power plant pollution plan"

New journal article coauthored by Karen Palmer and Joseph Aldy was featured in E&E News. Listed below is a partial quote:

“The EPA wouldn't eliminate the mercury rule with this proposal. Instead, it would eliminate the findings that underpin it. The agency is arguing that controlling mercury and other toxic air pollution from power plants is no longer ‘appropriate and necessary’ — a critical legal precondition for those mandates. Doing so would provide fodder for opponents of the standards to challenge them in federal court by saying that the pollution controls themselves are no longer legally required.

At issue specifically is the 2018 cost-benefit analysis underlying the proposed regulatory measure. Cost-benefit analysis is an arcane but powerful tool that has guided the development of federal regulations for four decades. ‘We've had a bipartisan consensus dating to Ronald Reagan that we should analyze the benefits and costs of the regulations that agencies issue,’ says Joseph Aldy, a public policy professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a former adviser to Obama and the Science article's lead author. He called the EPA's pollution analysis ‘some kind of legal distinction that's somehow inconsistent with the engineering, public health, and economic’ realities.”

Read the full article here.

The journal article was also featured by Eurasia Review. Listed below is a partial quote:

“Researchers from Harvard, Yale, Claremont McKenna College, UC Berkeley, Georgetown, and Resources for the Future (RFF), claim that EPA ‘ignores scientific evidence, economic best practice, and its own guidance’ in the new analysis. The authors assert that EPA ‘can and should do better.’

‘The EPA’s new analysis of the cost and benefits of the MATS rule is clearly insufficient. It fails to account for advances in our understanding of the negative health impacts of mercury and changes in electricity generation since 2011, which have led to much lower compliance costs than were originally projected,’ says RFF Senior Fellow Karen Palmer, a coauthor on the paper. ‘And, it dismisses an entire category of benefits.’”

Read the full article here.