If you were to do a cost-benefit analysis of your lunch, it would be pretty difficult to do the calculation without the sandwich. But it appears that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving in this same direction—removing the benefit—when it comes to air pollution regulations.
According to a New York Times report based on internal emails and documents—and demonstrated by a recently produced analysis on the EPA website—the EPA is changing its cost-benefit analysis process for common air pollutants. Instead of comparing the economic cost of a certain pollution limit to an estimate of the economic value of the resulting improvements in human health, the EPA will just qualitatively describe health benefits while carefully quantifying economic costs.
Cost-benefit analysis has been a key component of EPA regulations. Any decision to raise or lower air quality standards or pollution limits includes evaluations of the cost that change, like the addition of new pollution control equipment at power plants, would incur, for example.
That cost gets compared to the economic benefits of reduced pollution, which is obviously a bit harder to calculate. At the more tractable end of the spectrum, they can calculate things like health care costs and lost economic productivity for people whose health worsens. Even this requires an estimate of how much of a health impact to expect for a given change in pollution.
But what’s the intrinsic dollar value of someone’s health? Attempts to tackle that thorny question in some practical way result in estimates known as “value of a statistical life.” The EPA has described this as “how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution.” Having this number gives us something to hold up next to the cost of that pollution control equipment.