Yesterday Scott Pruitt announced that the EPA would begin taking comment on a potential new rule on how the agency conducts cost benefit analyses. The draft notice has the details, but the press release had the basics. And it’s clear from the agency’s language that this move is intended to legally justify devaluing American lives, now and in the future.
Specifically, the agency’s press release provides background information on how the Clean Power Plan calculated the social cost of carbon, and counted co-benefits, the value of reducing other pollutants that comes with reducing CO2. In adjusting the discount rate, Pruitt can reduce the perceived benefits of a policy by lowering how much we consider future lives to be worth. The less we value the health of our children, grandchildren and their children, the easier it is to justify letting industry pollute.
By excluding the benefits of reducing certain pollutants not specific to the policy at hand, like how the CPP reduced PM2.5 pollution from coal plants while cutting CO2, Pruitt can write off the thousands of lives saved by those reductions. The agency can, very literally, not count lives saved by a policy if the particular pollutant isn’t the primary target of the policy.
It’s not often that you can say clearly that the person responsible for protecting the public’s health from pollution doesn’t care about saving lives as much as he does saving money, but here’s a chance to do so. Through these changes to the cost-benefit analysis process, it is clear that Scott Pruitt doesn’t care if Americans die, so long as industry thrives.
Oddly--and in what we’re sure is a total coincidence--,the first news of this move came not from the agency itself, or from a news desk, but instead in the form of an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. After all, when you need to spin an issue as hard as possible to ignore the fact that you’re literally saying American lives don’t count, the WSJ’s opinion page is the place to be.
For anyone that needs further proof, look no further than the news yesterday that the EPA will limit its study of potentially toxic chemicals found in “dry-cleaning solvents, paint strippers and substances used in health and beauty products like shampoos and cosmetics,” Eric Lipton of the New York Times reports.
Instead of following the bipartisan 2016 changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act, Pruitt’s EPA will now turn a blind eye to how those chemicals could hurt humans once they’re in our air, water and soil. As a result of heavy industry lobbying (surprise!) and having former lobbyists now working at the EPA (Nancy Beck of the chemical lobby and Erik Baptist, formerly of the American Petroleum Institute, specifically) dangerous and potentially carcinogenic chemicals like paint strippers won’t be comprehensively studied for a risk assessment.
The EPA will instead only consider the direct impacts of the product when used correctly, effectively allowing them to pretend that chemicals are never spilled, never leak into our water, and are never mishandled.
Though it’s no shock Pruitt’s taking the industry’s side on this issue, one might have thought Pruitt might have gone the other way and and been extra careful about the safety of beauty products, given that he appears to have mishandled his own security team, forcing them to take him in search of the Ritz-Carlton’s fancy hand cream so he could Pruitt the lotion on the skin.
With his policies though, it’s all of us that’re getting hosed, again.
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