EPA says incidental benefits of pollution rules don’t count, Ars Technica

The Obama-era EPA went back and redid the rulemaking process, and the result was one of the more costly set of rules in US history. Those costs, however, paled in comparison to the benefits that would come through reduced medical costs and improved public health. Most of those benefits, however, did not come from the reduced mercury itself. Instead, the process of removing mercury from exhaust streams would also eliminate a lot of particulate emissions, and their absence drove many of the health benefits. The rules were put in place during the Obama administration, which was promptly sued. The case was still in the courts when Trump took office, and his EPA asked to withdraw from the case so it could formulate new rules. Meanwhile, with the old rules still in effect, utilities did what was needed in order to comply with them, in many cases passing that cost on to consumers. As a result, many utilities publicly voiced opposition to any attempts to roll back emissions limits. The coal industry, the source of most of the mercury, argued in favor of a rollback.

The new rules, announced yesterday , keep existing emissions limits in place. But how it justifies doing so is likely to generate some controversy. Not friends with co-benefits In both the EPA’s original and current estimate, the benefits of reducing mercury are relatively minor — the current estimate places those benefits at about $ 5 million a year. But the process of removing the mercury from the exhaust stream of a power plant also eliminates many other emissions, most notably particulates. The societal costs of particulates are substantial (although the EPA is not entirely convinced of that), so the mercury controls would come with what are called co-benefits. In this case, the co-benefits are substantially larger than the direct benefits, with estimates reaching well over $ billion annually. This is substantially more than the cost of the pollution controls. While Clean Air Act regulations do not require that the financial benefits outweigh the costs, having the cost-benefit analysis indicate that they do generally leaves a rule less vulnerable to lawsuits. The new EPA decision, however, indicates that it has determined that regulatory decisions should not consider co-benefits — at all, for this or any future rules. Only the direct benefits can be considered in performing a cost-benefit analysis. It is possible that this decision will leave the existing regulations subject to a lawsuit, as the coal industry would undoubtedly be interested in seeing them overturned. If the regulations are overturned, then it will leave utilities with a lot of unneeded equipment that, in many cases, has already had its costs passed on to consumers. It will certainly leave future tightening of these regulations in doubt, even if further studies identify additional issues associated with mercury.