EPA To Stop Considering the Economic Health Effects of Ozone, Particulate Matter

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will no longer consider the monetization of health benefits for two major pollutants. In a regulatory impact analysis from earlier this month, the agency states, “the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 [fine particulate matter] and ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.” The E.P.A claims, among other things, that the monetary equivalence of health benefits cannot be certain as not every person is exposed to the same level of pollution due to variations in location.

The EPA is required to consider the costs and benefits of a potential regulation before implementing it and tends to establish dollar figures for both. This involves painstakingly quantifying the impact of improvements such as longer lifespans, avoided deaths, increased productivity, and decreased spending on medical intervention. These benefits are then set against compliance costs that businesses will incur to prove the cost-effectiveness of a given rule. Analyzing the economics of health benefits in this way has historically been used to justify clean-air rules, and to help them hold up in court. 

Without consideration of the value of human life, the E.P.A. is left only to consider the economic costs incurred by industry when setting pollution limits. This may flout the 2015 Supreme Court case of Michigan v. E.P.A. which establishes that an agency must consider both the benefits and the costs of a regulation. The ruling did not, however, specify that these must both be economic calculations, and the E.P.A. says they will continue to consider health benefits, just not monetarily.

“E.P.A., like the agency always has, is still considering the impacts that PM2.5 and ozone emissions have on human health,” E.P.A. spokesperson Carolyn Holran told the New York Times. “Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact.” But the abandonment of an apples-to-apples comparison will likely obscure the true impact of clean air rules and accelerate the deregulatory agenda that the Trump E.P.A. has pursued over the past year.

Prior to this announcement federal agencies were already ordered to stop considering the social costs of carbon, unless it was “plainly required” by the law. The social cost of carbon is a metric used to estimate the economic damage caused by climate change. This ensured that costs to industry meeting a regulatory requirement were compared against the economic impacts of pollution on society.

In its outward communications, E.P.A. has consistently downplayed the benefits of its rulemaking while putting front and center the costs on businesses. In announcing the repeal of tailpipe emission regulation in July, for example, E.P.A. Administrator Lee Zeldin touted $54 billion in annual savings, but made no mention of the estimated $99 billion per year in benefits resulting from the rule.

For more information, see NEMWI’s Environmental Protection Agency Tracker here.

Reported by NEWMI Intern Roselynne Orrala, North Central College

Senators Send Letter to Vought, Telle, Seeking Progress on Brandon Road

Senators Gary Peters (D-MI), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought and Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle urging them to lift an administrative review on the Brandon Road Interbasin Project. The project, the Senators write, “has been thoroughly reviewed by Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers, and local partners, and its funding has been authorized and appropriated by Congress. The current review is unnecessary and could cause delays that put the Great Lakes’ ecosystem and fishing industry at risk.”

The BRIP is a $1.15 billion project that would be 90% federally funded, including $274 million that has already been appropriated. It would include a number of defenses to prevent invasive carp from entering the Great Lakes including an electric barrier, a carbon dioxide barrier, underwater acoustic deterrents, and a system to remove aquatic invasive species from barge hulls.

In May of last year, Illinois began the process of acquiring the land needed for construction to begin after President Trump expressed his support for the project in an Oval Office meeting with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and State House Speaker Matt Hall (R-MI). Shortly afterwards, the President issued a proclamation instructing the Army Corps on Engineers to move forward with the project with “maximum speed and efficiency.”

The letter stated “But now, the administration has evidently placed a pause on the BRIP, which, the Senators write, could imperil the project and the Great Lakes. The current pause and review could increase the cost and slow the final completion date of BRIP, increasing the likelihood that invasive carp could enter the Great Lakes.”

The project is vitally important in the fight against invasive carp, which pose a grave threat to the Great Lakes fishery. If they were to be introduced, carp could out-compete native fish, unsustainably consume vegetation, and impede recreational boating, jeopardizing the $5 billion Great Lakes Fishery.

House Subcommittee Holds Hearing on Rural AI Infrastructure

The House Committee on Small Business Subcommittee on Rural Development, Energy, and Supply Chains held a hearing on Wednesday, January 21st, during which testifying members spoke on the construction of AI data centers in rural America.

In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chair Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX) highlighted the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure into rural communities, including his own district. He stated that “Texas is leading the charge in data center development because of our pro-growth, pro-energy, low regulatory environment that has minimized the hindrance of red-tape.” He went on to say that the construction and continued maintenance of these datacenters are reliant on small businesses, whose labor covers “construction to infrastructure upgrades”.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-MN) sought to balance opportunity with caution in her opening statement. She stated that “new data centers can bring benefits like tax revenue and investment to rural areas that sorely need them, but as we pointed out in most hearings, it’s important to point out the whole picture.” To build datacenters that don’t hamper innovation, she continued, it is important to keep in mind the communities that surround them and be thoughtful and purposeful in their construction.

Chris Crosby, the chief executive officer of Compass Datacenters, addressed the Subcommittee on behalf of his company. He made the comparison that “data centers are the 21st century equivalent of the railroads” and said that his company would bring “substantial capital, jobs, and infrastructure investment” to rural communities. Kirk Offel, the CEO of datacenter company Overwatch, expressed a similar opinion. He furthered the idea that “small businesses are the backbone of this entire industry,” and have a significant hand in creating these rural datacenters.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, and the founder of the AI Equity Lab, took a more cautious approach to AI expansion. “We must listen to communities,” she said in her testimony, “communities must be actively involved with the onset of data center development and have transparency to assess the impacts of electricity, water, noise, and light pollution, jobs, land use, tax revenues.” In her response to Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander’s (D-NH) question about how to achieve this, Dr. Lee said that “Congress should move away from moratoriums and restrictions on states to be actually involved” at the negotiating table.

Reported by NEMWI Intern Asia Simms, Northeastern University Graduate

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