On Jan. 12, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it will no longer consider the monetary value of lives saved and health benefits gained in policies to curb fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the federal agency will simply consider the financial impact borne by companies that will follow these regulations.
“In January of this year, the administration said that EPA will no longer consider the monetary value of lives saved when restricting ozone and fine particulate pollutants and will only consider the costs of limiting these pollutants for companies (aka the polluters),” said Carleton Environmental Studies Director Professor Devavani Chatterjea.
Before coming to Carleton, Professor Chatterjea served as the Deputy Director of Chemical Safety and Plastic Pollution Prevention on the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Joe Biden from 2023 to 2024. She has also focused on preventing harm from exposure to “forever chemicals,” or PFAS.
Scientific research has demonstrated that fine particulate matter, or PM2.5 (particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter), can enter the lungs and the bloodstream. Additionally, ozone contributes to smog, which forms when nitrogen dioxide reacts with volatile organic compounds.
“That’s counterintuitive. Air pollution guidelines [are] supposed to help save lives,” said Eleanor McMullen ’29. “We have these standards for a reason, right? And when they don’t get met, terrible things happen. Consider the Great Smog of London, the Flint water crisis, and so on. These are examples of harm that could’ve been prevented.”
“The particulate matter that we’re worried about, PM2.5, is in the troposphere, because that’s the air that’s near the surface, and that’s what we inhale,” said Chemistry Professor Deborah Gross.
Gross, the Charles “Jim” and Marjorie Kade Professor of the Sciences for Chemistry, has conducted research on the chemical composition and size of PM2.5 in the troposphere, which is Earth’s lowest atmospheric layer. She has worked on tracking these particles to identify their source, as that provides insight into how to control or minimize their emissions.
“How long a particle stays up there is determined mostly by how big it is. The smaller particles live longer in the air before they settle out due to gravity, and they can live for weeks or months. They can travel globally, as well as regionally and locally,” Gross explained. “PM2.5 can be in the air for months.”
This particulate matter, which can stay where it was initially emitted, can also travel in the troposphere. This means the effects of PM2.5 are not just limited to the area from which the particles originated. Instead, their impacts are far-reaching in terms of who they affect and how they interact with humans and the environment.
“I grew up in an area similar in size to Northfield. I think that rural towns will feel some effects, but I am more worried for the bigger cities where the effects of air pollution are going to be heavily concentrated,” McMullen shared.
“Airborne pollutants are associated with lung, breast, liver, and pancreatic cancers as well as respiratory conditions including asthma,” Chatterjea said. “Without regulations, the air will get dirtier and incidences of these cancers will likely rise, leading to higher numbers of deaths, more expensive healthcare (which is itself at risk), and overall lower quality of life. Air pollution can stunt plant growth, create acid rain, which threatens aquatic life in lakes, rivers, and streams and impacts the health of non-human wildlife.”
Gross also emphasized how proximity to emissions directly affects health across socioeconomic classes.
“People who have greater exposure [to PM2.5] have worse health outcomes, and that greater exposure correlates with where zoning is for industrial sites or where homes are in close proximity to industrial sites or to freeways. And there’s no surprise in the fact that those are related to socioeconomic status, and lower-income neighborhoods are much more dramatically affected.”
This change in policy is viewed by policy experts like Chatterjea as trading a focus on citizen welfare for corporate profit.
“This is a real and symbolic act that disregards health in favor of a bottom line. Our air will be dirtier because companies will most likely argue that limiting pollutants (or cleaning them up) will harm their bottom line,” Chatterjea said.
“In September, the administration announced plans to shut down the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and the Mobile Sources Technical Review Subcommittee, both critical for reviewing and setting clean air standards,” Chatterjea said. “This removes mechanisms for expert monitoring and recommendations to keep our air clean. Again, our air will most likely be dirtier.”
Gross was able to break down what this policy calls the EPA’s and the federal government’s views on the value of a human life and the reasoning behind them.
“Because there’s so much uncertainty in the way we statistically calculate the value of a human life, [the EPA] is going to say, ‘ah’, and throw [those calculations] out,” said Gross. “The rhetoric is this is just temporary until [the EPA can] figure it out better. But it’s not something you can figure out better. I think maybe it can get a little bit more precise or represented a little bit better, but I don’t know that it can be changed dramatically for sure.”
“Essentially, what the EPA has been doing up to now is for new regulations and for existing regulations, doing a cost-benefit analysis, and they figure out the cost to whoever’s getting regulated from this regulation, and then they figure out what’s the benefit to the environment and public health,” said Gross. “My understanding is what they’re doing now for PM2.5 and ozone only is saying, ‘we’re not going to calculate the benefits right now, just the costs, okay?’ And so we’re going to figure out what it would cost the industry to implement or adjust or maintain these regulations.”
McMullen also expressed concern for what they felt was the devaluing of human life by the EPA and the federal government.
“From more of a pre-health standpoint, I think there is some moral difficulty in answering the question, ‘How do you quantify the value of a life?’” McMullen, a prospective pre-health student, said. “However, that is because lives are invaluable, not valueless. Something we’ve seen throughout this administration, both at the beginning of the pandemic and now, is that public health should notbe politicized. I think this is yet another example of that.”
According to an EPA spokesperson, the agency is still considering the value of lives, just not in dollars and cents. However, more liberal critics have argued that the monetary valuation of human lives has informed effective air policy that has prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths that would have likely resulted from air pollution.
“I don’t want to overgeneralize, but Democrats tend to have harsher EPA policies, [whereas] Republicans [have] more [lenient ones]. So there is this ebb and flow to policies, but disregard for human lives seems like a step too far,” McMullen said in response to being asked about political polarization in the United States.
The political party holding federal power can have a tremendous impact on environmental policy, as can the government’s structure.
“What we need to watch for is whether, if and how regulations change. Because if this is saying that the administration or the EPA is going to try to assess PM2.5 and ozone differently in order to change the regulation, then the regulation still has to change before companies would be dealing with a new landscape, and that has to go through Congress,” Gross explained.
Instead, she highlighted how government policy takes time to take effect, and that it impacts different companies in various ways: “It’s not a done deal that they say we’re not going to calculate the benefit part, and then automatically, companies can just do what they want.”
Under President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the organization has largely been pulling back stricter policies.
“Last March the EPA invited polluters to simply send an email to ask for toxic pollutant exemptions. So far, about a third of all coal plants, chemical manufacturers, coke ovens, sterilizers, and other domestic polluting entities have received two year exemptions,”Chatterjea said.
“In less public news, the EPA is also undermining itself by reconsidering whether it has the authority to revise air pollution standards based on newly available science,” she added. “This is a blow to evidence decision making, to science-based policymaking, and likely leads to dirtier air.”
Gross reflected on the impact of the United States and the EPA on environmental policy worldwide, and considered the future of policy.
“I think for a long time, the EPA has had a real leadership role, but many of the EPA air quality regulations are not the strictest compared to Europe. I hope there will not be backsliding in other locations if that’s what ends up happening here,” she said.
