EPA: Climate rule may save more lives than projected
Agency still plans on nixing Obama measure
A sweeping Obama-era climate rule could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2030, the Trump administration has found in its analysis of the plan, projecting that the plan could save more lives than the Obama administration said it would.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving to repeal the plan.
The rule in question is the Clean Power Plan, which consists of regulations on U.S. power plants aimed at decreasing the country’s contribution to global climate change by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. In practice, the rule is projected to move the energy sector away from coal-fired power plants and toward more natural gas-fired power plants, as well as wind and solar power sources.
Such power sources have lower emissions of greenhouse gases, but they also produce lower quantities of other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide. Such pollutants can cause respiratory problems, heart disease and lung cancer, conditions that would therefore be made less prevalent by the climate regulations.
The Obama administration touted the Clean Power Plan’s health benefits while the EPA put measure in place in 2015. At the time, President Barack Obama’s EPA asserted that the plan could prevent 1,500 to 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030.
But when President Donald Trump’s EPA released a draft analysis of its repeal of the plan last month, it said that in one scenario, the plan would prevent 1,900 to 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2030.
That scenario is based on a 2017 “annual energy outlook” by the federal Energy Information Administration — which contained projections for the evolution of the U.S. power sector with, and without, the Clean Power Plan. It’s a more recent analysis than the ones EPA used under the Obama administration.
“The right way to do this is update your model, your analysis for more recent conditions,” said Alan Krupnick, an economist with the think tank Resources for the Future. “Which is what that second analysis does. And then the chips fall where they may.”
The new figure appears deep in a long, technocratic document called a Regulatory Impact Analysis that the EPA released last month when it moved to repeal the plan.
The Trump administration’s EPA has said that, in its analysis of the Clean Power Plan, it has deliberately provided a range of different numbers to outline different possibilities. The agency suggests that this is necessary because there were “numerous concerns and uncertainties associated with the previous administration’s approach.”
“In keeping with Administrator [Scott] Pruitt’s commitment to a heightened level of transparency, the Agency provided a vast series of scenarios of the potential effects of the proposed rule, including those based on EIA’s 2017 Energy Outlook; and we welcome any public comments on the RIA,” said Michael Abboud, an agency spokesperson.
From the perspective of the Trump administration’s EPA, the Clean Power Plan was illegally drawn, going beyond the agency’s authority, specifically because it sought to change the broad nature of the energy system, rather than to reduce pollution levels at individual plants. How many lives the policy would save is not central to this legal determination and presumably would not change the agency’s decision to repeal it.
Still, some advocates who support the plan are touting the revision. “The benefits of the Clean Power Plan are even greater than EPA forecast two years ago,” said Paul Billings, the senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.
The draft Regulatory Impact Analysis provides a formal accounting of the costs and benefits of the EPA’s decision to withdraw from the rule to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is open for public comment until Dec. 15.