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“Air pollution shortens lives.”
What is the value of a human life? According to the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, the answer is zero dollars.
Recently, in a decision buried in regulatory documents, the EPA announced it would no longer calculate the economic benefits of lives saved when setting limits on fine particulate matter and ozone, arguably two of the deadliest air pollutants, responsible for an estimated 135,000 premature American deaths every year. From now on, the agency will only tally the costs to industry. The benefits to human beings? Too uncertain to count, according to the EPA.
The science is far from uncertain. The landmark Harvard Six Cities Study, which tracked the health of thousands of Americans from the 1970s through the 1990s, proved unambiguously that air pollution shortens lives. Hundreds of subsequent studies have confirmed and refined those findings. What the administration calls uncertainty is actually inconvenience — the inconvenience of having to acknowledge that corporate profits come at a cost measured in human lives.
The great irony is that when the government protects human...
