What’s the value of a dollar? Much less than it was before Donald Trump took office, but evidently more than that of a human life — at least if you ask the US Environmental Protection Agency, that is.
That rather grim valuation came after the EPA updated its policies on industrial pollution limits. For years, the EPA has baked a figure called the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) into its cost-benefit calculations on things like factory pollution. Think of it as the number that answers the question: how much is keeping someone alive worth, in dollars, weighed against the cost of making a corporation clean up after itself?
As Fortune notes, the previous answer hovered at about $11.7 million per person. The Trump administration’s answer is zero.
Erasing the VSL has direct consequences for the regulatory limits on the two most common air pollutants: ozone and fine particulate matter, which are debris 30 times smaller than a human hair. When lives are assigned a higher dollar value, stricter pollution standards tend to clear the “economic efficiency” sniff test, resulting in cleaner air. But that improved air quality comes at the expense of America’s industrial industries, which have to invest in pricey systems to reduce the amount of these pollutants they spew down to acceptable levels.
When lives are worth nothing, however, that bar effectively disappears, resulting in dramatically weaker regulations on how much garbage corporations can pump into the air. That horrifying decision could reverse every gain made since the Clean Air Act in 1970, which as environmental economist Michael Greenstone told Fortune, improved the average US resident’s life expectancy by 1.4 years.
“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Greenstone said. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”
An administration’s assigned VSL, while not the only measure, is seen as a major factor in where a president falls in the struggle between corporate and environmental interests. Pro-industry administrations have toggled it lower, while those more concerned toward public health have pushed it up. However, no president before Trump has ever zeroed-out it out — a total victory for industrial capitalists who will no longer be burdened by the value of human life.
More on environmental regulation: Clean Energy Industry Launching Campaign of Vengeance
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