Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman at the NYTimes (The E.P.A.’s Review of Mercury Rules Could Remake Its Methods for Valuing Human Life and Health):
Last week the Trump administration took a crucial step toward de-emphasizing the life and health benefits in this calculus when the Environmental Protection Agency said it would rethink a major regulation that restricts mercury emissions by coal-burning power plants.
The 2011 mercury rule — based on decades of research showing that mercury damages the brain, lungs and fetal health — is among the costliest but most effective clean-air policies put forth by the Environmental Protection Agency. Utilities estimate they have spent $18 billion installing clean-air technology, and mercury pollution has fallen by nearly 70 percent.
Modifying the rule could have an impact far beyond any immediate concerns about the release of toxic mercury into the air and water. In fact, the re-evaluation fits into a far-reaching administration strategy to loosen environmental rules affecting countless other industries for years to come by adjusting the factors used to judge the benefits to human health that the rule has brought.
“This goes way beyond just weakening the mercury rule,” said Alan Krupnick, an economist at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan Washington research organization. “This is part of a change that would give the Trump administration a way to more easily justify loosening many other pollution regulations, such as rules on smog, and rules on climate-change pollution.” …
The electric utilities that operate the nation’s coal-fired plants, and thus are heavily affected by the mercury rule, are urging the administration to leave the rule alone. They have already spent billions of dollars to become compliant, the utilities say, so changes are of little benefit to them. …
The calculations that the E.P.A. conducts for every major new air or water regulation lie at the philosophical heart of the agency’s work. And its process for that analysis has long been in industry’s cross hairs.
That’s because the agency has long counted not just the direct health benefits of pulling a certain pollutant out of the atmosphere, but also what are called the “co-benefits” that occur when, as a result, other toxins are also reduced.
For example, in the case of the mercury rule, the Obama administration found between $4 million to $6 million in health benefits directly from curbing mercury. But it further justified the regulation by citing an additional $80 billion in health benefits a year by, among other things, preventing as many as 11,000 premature deaths. Those savings come from a reduction in particulate matter linked to heart and lung disease that also occurs when cutting mercury emissions.
So, you can see why industry and the Trump administration is so upset. The co-benefits of 11,000 premature deaths should be worth zero in the mercury rule because mercury ain't whats killing them.
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