The EPA will no longer include monetized health benefits from reduced PM2.5 exposure (specifically claims of prevented premature deaths) in cost-benefit analyses for certain air quality regulations.

Milloy describes this as removing “fraud” or “imaginary deaths,” arguing that the science linking typical ambient PM2.5 levels to premature mortality is “junk science” dating back to the Clinton-era EPA’s 1997 PM2.5 standards.

These benefits have inflated regulatory justifications for decades, making rules overly burdensome without real-world evidence.

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By Steve Milloy

The Trump Environmental Protection Agency just decided to no longer inflate the monetized benefits of EPA air quality regulations with imaginary deaths prevented. This has put the greens into orbit.

The Daily Caller has the story.

The New York Times headline blared “EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.” The article continues: “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.”

EPA chief Lee Zeldin responded on X: “Yet another dishonest, fake news claim courtesy of the New York Times. Not only is the EXACT OPPOSITE of this headline the actual truth, but the Times is already VERY WELL AWARE that EPA will still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. The Times’ unyielding commitment to destroying journalism is second to none.”

(RELATED: How One White House Council Is Fighting To End ‘Regulatory Reign Of Terror’)

What is going on?

The evaluation of a proposed rule’s costs and benefits has been a commonsense administrative requirement before setting new regulations since the Reagan administration. Until the Clinton administration, so-called cost-benefit analysis was an effective tool in stopping costly overregulation, particularly at the EPA. But the Clinton EPA figured out how to game the cost-benefit analysis process in order to issue its most expensive regulations – air quality rules that were eventually used by the Obama EPA to destroy half of the U.S. coal industry.

After failing in its first effort to implement an anti-fossil fuel agenda through a “BTU tax,” the Clinton EPA moved to issue more stringent air quality standards for ozone. The problem is that the monetized benefits of the tighter ozone standard (possibly fewer asthma attacks triggered by outdoor air) paled in comparison to the economy-wide compliance costs of the regulation (tens of billions of dollars).

The Clinton EPA’s solution was to pair the ozone proposal with another proposal to regulate, for the first time, a newly invented air pollutant called “fine particulate matter” or “PM2.5,” which is microscopic dust, soot or pollen in outdoor air. As described in great detail in my 2016 book “Scare Pollution,” the Clinton administration developed the false and junk science-based notion that normal levels of PM2.5 in outdoor air could cause people to die prematurely.

How did this help the ozone proposal?

The EPA claimed that regulating PM2.5 would prevent 20,000 premature deaths per year. Each prevented death, the EPA claimed, provided economic benefits of $5 million. When you multiply 20,000 premature deaths prevented by $5 million dollars, you get $100 billion in economic benefits, which the EPA claimed would be much greater than any possible compliance costs. So, the EPA’s proposed air quality rules passed the required cost-benefit test since the benefits outweighed the costs.

Read the full story here.