"Either industry is going to get away with not cleaning up its own pollution and forcing those costs upon the public in the most hazardous and dangerous ways possible to human health, or the costs are going to be internalized by the company.”Ĭurrently, the EPA's definition of "benefits" includes not just the most direct benefits of a regulation, but also what are considered indirect or ancillary benefits. "Those costs are going to occur one way or another," Walke said. public costs, and Pruitt's evident interest in moving as much cost as possible from industry to the shoulders of the taxpayers. While the concept of "cost-benefit" can be complex in its details, the general concept is simple enough: EPA weighs the costs of a regulation to the industry versus the health and environmental protective benefits to the public. The latter is generally measured in lives saved and reductions in negative effects from pollution, including emergency-room visits, missed work days and other such costs.Īs such, the calculus really should be understood more as a question of industry costs vs.
“To the extent that you’re changing that the way the agency has to do that, and if you’re increasing the burden on the agency to justify actions they’re taking to protect the environment and public health, that’s potentially very significant.” "How EPA weighs and calculates the costs and benefits of any particular action has significant regulatory implications," explained Melanie Benesh, the legislative attorney for Environmental Working Group.
“It’s clearly a precursor to scaling back the way EPA quantifies and monetizes the benefits of its rules and safeguards," John Walke, director of federal clean air, climate, and energy programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Salon. But hidden inside all that dense language is the prospect of seriously gutting the EPA's ability to do the work necessary to protect public health. The advance notice is written in dry legalese, the sort of thing that doesn't play as well as a story about moisturizer-hunting. The agency announced an advance notice of proposed rule-making on Thursday, which is the first step towards rewriting standards the agency has used to determine the value of new regulations for years. This failed to note that Pruitt himself was one of the main complainers, during his repeated efforts to sue the EPA while serving as Oklahoma's attorney general. "Many have complained that the previous administration inflated the benefits and underestimated the costs of its regulations through questionable cost-benefit analysis," Pruitt said in a press release. Last week, as most of the media focused on admittedly hilarious scandals regarding Pruitt using government resources to get nice mattresses, fancy lotions and gourmet meals, Pruitt quietly moved to start redefining how the EPA handles the cost-benefit calculations the agency uses to determine what kinds of regulations it imposes on polluting industries. Despite being weighed down by increasingly ridiculous corruption scandals, EPA head Scott Pruitt has never slowed down in his efforts to cripple the actual work of the agency Donald Trump handed over to him to destroy.
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