Nonprofit Quarterly: “The Polluters Down the Street—EPA Changes Put Lives at Risk”
RFF Senior Fellow Bryan Hubbell helps explain the US Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to stop monetizing the human health benefits of regulation.
“It can be hard to put a monetary value on the lives saved and the costs avoided for hospitalizations and medicine, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has endeavored to do so since the 1970s. Bryan Hubbell, a former EPA employee who worked on calculating the human health benefits of air pollution regulations, explained that those estimates are then factored into a cost-benefit analysis with costs to businesses of complying with the act’s regulations. Those figures can then be used to justify existing and proposed regulations that help protect people from exposures.
Now, The New York Times has reported, the EPA, under the Trump administration, will no longer produce the calculations for human lives saved. Experts indicate that this directly contradicts the EPA’s mandate of protecting human and environmental health.”
