An attempt by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to roll back federal limits on mercury emissions ignores important public health benefits, an economist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies writes in a new paper. And it could set a dangerous precedent.
In 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued regulatory limits on the emissions of mercury and other hazardous pollutants from coal-burning power plants. Now, however, the EPA is trying to roll back the legal basis of the rule, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), arguing in part that the benefits don’t justify the costs.
In a new paper published in Science, Matthew Kotchen, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a team of colleagues argue that the proposed EPA roll back is “seriously flawed.” The authors argue that the analysis disregards public health benefits, recent scientific findings, and transformative change in the electric sector over the past decade. If the proposed roll back happens — as it could any day — it will not only undermine implementation of the rule, but set a dangerous precedent that might make it harder to justify other environmental regulations on an economic basis.
The article published in Science is based on a more extensive report that the authors wrote as part of the External Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (E-EEAC), an independent organization established after the dissolution in 2018 of the original EEAC that had operated for more than 25 years within the EPA’s science advisory board structure, and of which Kotchen was a member.
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