Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt’s unending parade of ethical violations keeps grabbing headlines, but his dogged efforts to dismantle environmental safeguards that protect the health and well-being of Americans should concern us the most. Some of these efforts are obvious, like repealing power-plant pollution limits or rolling back vehicle-emissions standards. His most recent move, however, is more insidious.

Last week, Pruitt issued an advance notice of proposed rule-making seeking comments on how the EPA should treat “co-benefits” when assessing the economic impacts of environmental regulation. Co-benefits refer to any positive effects a regulation might have outside of the one directly targeted by the rule. The notice does not telegraph the agency’s position on the question, but Pruitt’s recent statements suggest a predetermined outcome: He’d like the EPA to not have to take them into account. In a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he promised to eliminate the use of co-benefits in the economic analyses accompanying new regulations. And he already took this approach in proposing to repeal the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants.

Rewriting agency guidelines to ignore co-benefits might sound like a mundane accounting change, but over time it would have grave effects on public health and welfare. This change would make it appear that regulations deliver fewer benefits relative to their costs than they in fact would. This would then make it easier for Pruitt to justify repealing rules, further tilting the scales toward the powerful polluters that he insistently favors—while severely disadvantaging the families and communities that bear the heavy burden of pollution.

Pruitt has employed this strategy in the past. It was primarily by ignoring billions of dollars in co-benefits that Pruitt tried to make his proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan look like a good deal for the American public. That rule was expected to produce not just $20 billion in climate benefits from carbon dioxide reductions, but also an additional $13 billion to $30.3 billion in co-benefits because it would reduce particulate matter pollution: dangerous microscopic solids, or liquid droplets, that are small enough to be inhaled. These particulate-matter reductions were a desirable side effect of the operational changes happening at plants to limit their carbon dioxide output. And the reductions’ beneficial effects on public health—in the form of avoiding thousands of premature deaths annually, as well as fewer heart attacks and asthma hospitalizations—were alone sufficient to justify the Clean Power Plan’s costs. But Pruitt essentially ignored them when making an economic case for repeal. And if Pruitt gets his way going forward, the willful blindness to public health improvements exhibited in the Clean Power Plan analysis will become a standard feature of all EPA rule-making. As my colleague Kimberly Castle and I discuss in a forthcoming article, Pruitt’s approach is inconsistent with scientific evidence, long-standing agency practice under presidents of both parties, and judicial decisions.

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EPA intends to form “red team” to debate climate science

Enlarge / US EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. (credit: Gage Skidmore) US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have been making some headlines for publicly rejecting the conclusions of climate science. But in between wrongly claiming that climate scientists just don’t know how much of a contribution… Read entire story.

Source: Ars Technica