Cheap Land Here: But What Is the Cost
Opinion: Small particles, big impacts for our air
Republished with permission
The editor of N.C. Health News tracks the repeal of an environmental regulation by the EPA and explains how changes to seemingly small regulations have big health impacts.
By Rose Hoban
N.C. Health News
Breathe in. And out. Do it a few more times.
Then think about what having clean air means to you — and to your health.
Research presents ample evidence that the quality of the air is related to the quality of your health. One of my mentors in graduate school was a guy named Kirk Smith. He was the first person to measure the quality of indoor air in developing countries: He had women wear halter monitors that measured levels of particulates, carbon monoxide and other gases from indoor cookstoves.
Most of us aren’t standing over a wood stove to cook day in and day out, but Kirk was a pioneer in measuring the effects of pollution on human beings. Years ago, he turned me onto the growing awareness of what were then called “ultrafine” particles, now known as PM 2.5. They’re created in a variety of ways, but most commonly by internal combustion engines.
There’s a lot of research to show that schools (commonly built on cheap land) next to highways (cheap land there!) have more kids who develop asthma as a result of their exposure to emissions and the PM 2.5 in those emissions.
Increased knowledge of these health effects are what drove, in part, changes in environmental regulations in the U.S. for several generations. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has documented these effects in a giant document, the Integrated Science Assessment for Particulate Matter, that was published in 2019.
The ISAPM acknowledged places where more research was necessary, but it backed up the idea that exposure to PMs was “causal” for cardiac, respiratory and other effects, including the development of cancer and increased mortality. (By the way, I downloaded the ISAPM and uploaded it to our website, just in case it disappears as some other EPA documents have. You can peruse all 1,968 pages at your leisure.)
Yes, it costs industry more to clean up what was coming out of smokestacks, but the benefit was the savings in the form of, say, fewer kids arriving at emergency departments because they had an asthma attack. Not to mention the benefit of having a healthy populace.
However, now the EPA is throwing that measurement rubric out the window. As of this month, agency leaders announced that for some major air pollutants, such as PMs and ozone, cost-benefit analyses will no longer include the dollar value of health benefits derived from limiting their emissions.
Agency leaders cited “uncertainties” in the estimates of the benefits.
“To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and
ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts,” the agency wrote.
In short, we’ve not generated randomized controlled trials where one group of people breathes PM 2.5s while others get pure air, so we can’t be absolutely sure of the effects. Instead, much of the data comes from multitudes of observational and epidemiological studies — which inherently have more uncertainty, but make up for those uncertainties by large datasets that reduce the probability of error to a minuscule amount.
The agency will be taking into account the costs of mitigation to industry, however. Those are much easier to quantify. So, a cost-benefit analysis without consideration of the benefits. And industries will have the ability to sue to have standards loosened.
Enjoy that air, while it lasts.
Rose Hoban, the founder and editor of N.C. Health News, is a registered nurse and journalist who’s been reporting on health care in North Carolina for two decades. A version of this piece originally appeared in the newsletter of N.C. Health News, subscribe here. This opinion column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free anywhere under our guidelines.
