By Maxine Joselow
Some regulatory experts had mixed reactions to the move.
“On one hand, the administration does make some valid points that E.P.A. statements have implied a false precision in the past,” said Susan Dudley, who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during President George W. Bush’s second term and now teaches at George Washington University. “On the other hand, the way to rectify that is not to stop quantifying the health effects altogether.”
Others were less circumspect in their criticism.
“If the rationale is that benefits are uncertain, well, costs are uncertain, too,” said Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research group. “Considering costs without considering benefits is like trying to cut a piece of cloth with one blade of the scissors: The cut is likely going to be inaccurate and rough.”
Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970. Steep reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the average American’s life expectancy since 1970, according to research by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index project.
“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Dr. 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.”
Dr. Greenstone and other economists said the value of a statistical life has often been misinterpreted as the value that the government assigns to a single person’s life. But it is actually the value that the government assigns to slightly reducing the risk of death for a large group of people.
To determine this value, government economists have turned to studies on the labor market, which show that workers demand higher wages before agreeing to perform jobs with greater risks of workplace fatalities.