The EPA – Saving Lives for the Past Forty Years
The conservative mantra that government is bad and that we should always rely on the free market runs into a fundamental problem – reality. The latest example of the fallacy of the conservatives’ anti-government thinking is a study from the U.S. EPA released on Tuesday that shows the overwhelming health and economic benefit of the federal Clean Air Act, which will save nearly 4.2 million lives between 1990 and 2020, at a cost that is only 1/30th of the monetized benefits of the Act to society.
With regards to air pollution, the problem for conservatives is that, without government, industry has no reason to limit its pollution. In fact, a company that spends money limiting its pollution by, for example, installing pollution controls or making a cleaner process, would put itself at a competitive disadvantage to companies that simply emit their pollution into the air. As a result, without environmental laws, coal-fired power plants, industrial facilities, and automobiles emitted millions of tons of air pollution every year to the detriment of public health, the environment, and visibility.
In 1970, we finally began to address this problem through the federal Clean Air Act which, in combination with amendments to the Act in 1977 and 1990, started requiring polluting facilities to install pollution controls, mandated that emissions from cars, trucks, and buses be substantially reduced, and required local areas to come into compliance with public-health based air quality standards. At the time, conservatives and industry claimed that the Clean Air Act would destroy the economy, but the result was exactly the opposite.
On Tuesday, the U.S. EPA released a report evaluating the benefits and costs of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. That study concluded that:
* Total annual costs to comply with the law were $20 billion in 2000, $53 billion in 2010, and $65 billion in 2020
* Total number of premature deaths avoided per year was 110,000 in 2000, 160,000 in 2010, and 230,000 in 2020
* Total economic value of the law (including value of avoiding premature deaths and non-fatal health impacts, increased visibility, and reduced impacts on agriculture and forestry) were $750 billion in 2000, $1.2 trillion in 2010, and $1.9 trillion in 2020.
Over the 30 year period of 1990 to 2020, the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act are expected to save a total of 4.2 million lives, with an economic benefit that outweighs costs by approximately 30 to 1. An earlier EPA study found that similar public health and economic benefits accrued from the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Acts from 1970 to 1990. In short, the evidence is clear that the federal Clean Air Act has been an overwhelming success for public health, the environment, and our national economy. Such results give lie to conservatives’ fantasy that government should be largely eliminated and replaced with nearly exclusive reliance on the free market.
As we’ve explained previously, however, much work remains to be done to protect public health and improve air quality in America. For example, there are numerous coal-fired power plants throughout the country that still lack modern pollution controls, and emissions from those plants are estimated to cause 13,200 premature deaths per year. Emissions of hazardous air pollutants cause approximately 10,800 cancers per year, and greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired facilities help exacerbate climate change.
The U.S. EPA is currently in the process of promulgating regulations that would significantly reduce such impacts to public health and climate from air pollution. Unfortunately, Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress are trying to interfere with EPA’s ability to protect public health and our climate by amending the Clean Air Act to weaken EPA’s authority. It is critical that we push back against these efforts by trumpeting the amazing success of the Clean Air Act to date, and the importance of continuing that success by protecting public health and our climate. Help do so by writing a letter to the editor and calling your Senators and Congressperson.
Here are links for submitting letters to the editor for national papers, and to newspapers in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
And, as always, if you have any feedback on this post, let us know at Winning Progressive’s Facebook page.
Tags: air pollution, Clean Air Act, climate change, CO2, coal, conservatives, environment, EPA, global warming, greenhouse gases, hazardous air pollutants, progressive victories, public health
