This week, the EPA said they’ll be changing how it will evaluate future clean air regulations. They’ll stop monetizing the health benefits of air-pollution reductions like avoided hospitalizations, reduced health-care costs, and premature deaths prevented when conducting cost-benefit analyses for major air rules.
For decades, EPA has included these estimates when evaluating pollution standards under the Clean Air Act. While the Act requires EPA to base national ambient air quality standards on public-health protection rather than cost, cost-benefit analyses have long been used to inform rulemaking, defend regulations in court, and explain policy choices to the public.
Under the new approach, EPA says they’ll consider health impacts but won’t assign them a dollar value in regulatory analyses. Instead, EPA will focus its economic analysis primarily on compliance costs to regulated industries.
This change matters because monetized health benefits have historically dwarfed regulatory costs in clean-air rules. Assigning dollar values to avoided asthma attacks, heart disease, and early deaths has helped show that stronger standards produce net economic benefits.
EPA is not yet finalizing a wholesale rollback of national ambient air quality standards. But, this week’s announcement signals that they’re preparing to release a new rulemaking to relax at least particulate and ozone standards in the coming weeks or months – and that they’ll dismiss the health part of the equation as they set the standards.
That said, this policy choice isn’t permanent. A different administration in three years could reverse course and restore monetized health analyses. If that happens, the result may be a temporary period of a year or two of weaker standards, followed by a return to more health-protective approaches.
