The Environmental Protection Agency has updated its policies on industrial pollution limits, effectively assigning a zero dollar value to human life in its cost-benefit calculations. The change eliminates the "value of a statistical life" (VSL), a metric that for years hovered around $11.7 million per person, according to Fortune. The Trump administration's new figure is zero.
The VSL is used to weigh the economic benefits of keeping people alive against the costs corporations incur to reduce pollution. With lives valued at zero, the economic efficiency test for stricter pollution standards effectively disappears. This directly impacts regulations on ozone and fine particulate matter—debris 30 times smaller than a human hair—two of the most common air pollutants.
When VSL is higher, stricter pollution standards tend to pass cost-benefit analyses, leading to cleaner air. But that improved air quality comes at a cost to industrial industries, which must invest in expensive systems to reduce emissions. With VSL at zero, that bar is removed, resulting in dramatically weaker regulations on how much pollution corporations can release into the air.
Environmental economist Michael Greenstone told Fortune that the decision could reverse every gain made since the Clean Air Act of 1970. That law, Greenstone said, improved the average US resident's life expectancy by 1.4 years. "Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century," 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."
While the VSL is not the only measure, an administration's assigned value is seen as a major factor in where a president falls in the struggle between corporate and environmental interests. Pro-industry administrations have toggled it lower, while those more concerned with public health have pushed it up. However, no president before Trump has ever zeroed it out—a total victory for industrial capitalists who will no longer be burdened by the value of human life.
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