The Environmental Protection Agency has changed how it weighs costs and benefits in key air pollution rules, a move that ends decades of practice that put a dollar figure on lives saved and illnesses avoided. The shift appears in a final rule that updated federal emissions standards for stationary combustion turbines — large gas-burning units used at power plants, industrial facilities and other sites. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin signed the rule on Jan. 9, and the Federal Register published it on Jan. 15.
Alongside the technical changes, the EPA’s economic analysis states the agency will no longer “monetize” benefits tied to fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, and ground-level ozone — pollutants that public health researchers link to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Instead, the EPA says it will continue to quantify emissions while it works on methods it considers reliable enough to translate health impacts into dollar terms.
The EPA says the step responds to uncertainty in the models used to estimate health impacts, including the “benefit-per-ton” approach that assigns an average dollar value to each ton of pollution reduced. The agency’s analysis argues that past regulatory impact analyses often relied on point estimates that created “a false sense of precision” about PM2.5 and ozone impacts.
Critics say the change does far more than tidy up economic assumptions. By keeping industry compliance costs in dollars while dropping monetized health benefits, the EPA makes rules look more expensive and less worthwhile on paper, they argue, even when the same medical evidence still links pollution to disease.
“The EPA’s mandate is to protect public health,” said John Walke, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calling the approach “reckless, dangerous, and illegal,” according to The Associated Press.
The EPA rejects that framing. Spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch told the AP the agency “absolutely remains committed to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” but it “will not be monetizing the impacts at this time.” She added that not monetizing does not mean the EPA will ignore health impacts.
In cost-benefit analysis, “monetizing” means translating outcomes into dollars so policymakers and the public can compare them to the price tag of compliance. For air rules, those benefits typically include avoided premature deaths, fewer hospital visits, reduced asthma attacks and fewer missed work and school days. Economists often use a “value of a statistical life,” a measure based on how much large numbers of people would be willing to pay for small reductions in mortality risk. The EPA notes that the term can mislead people into thinking the government places a price tag on an individual life, when the analysis instead sums many small risk reductions across a population.
OMB guidance has long pushed agencies toward these comparisons. Circular A-4, issued Sept. 17, 2003, instructs federal agencies to evaluate both benefits and costs of regulatory alternatives as part of regulatory analysis under executive orders governing rulemaking.
The EPA’s new economic analysis for the turbine rule says uncertainty has grown as overall pollution levels have fallen and as analysts rely on simplified tools that average impacts across regions. It also suggests the agency wants to reassess how it estimates benefits relative to national air quality standards — the “divide between clean air and air with an unacceptable level of pollution,” as the analysis describes it.
The turbine standards themselves set limits for nitrogen oxides, or NOx, and sulfur dioxide, or SO2. NOx contributes to ozone and can also help form particulate pollution; SO2 can form particle pollution and harms the respiratory system at high levels. EPA’s fact sheet estimates the final rule will cut annual NOx emissions by up to 296 tons by 2032 and generate industry cost savings of up to $87 million over eight years. The economic impact analysis also describes the rule as “cost saving” under common discount rates, with net costs shown as negative over the 2025-2032 analysis window.
Even so, environmental groups argue the final standards fall short of what the agency proposed under President Joe Biden. The Environmental Defense Fund said the rule includes weaker protections than the 2006 framework for some gas plants and creates a carve-out for certain temporary turbines, including units that can serve data centers.
PM2.5 and ozone often drive the largest monetized benefits in air rules, even when a regulation targets a different pollutant, the EPA’s turbine analysis acknowledges. That history helps explain the political fight: large monetized benefits have supported stricter standards across administrations. When the EPA finalized a tougher national soot standard on Feb. 7, 2024, the agency said the rule could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and yield up to $46 billion in net health benefits in 2032.
The EPA’s new approach emerged as the Trump administration seeks to roll back or revisit multiple air and climate policies, including Biden-era actions aimed at fine particle pollution. Legal challenges likely loom. Courts have required agencies to consider costs in certain Clean Air Act decisions, including the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Michigan v. EPA. Opponents of the new approach argue that the EPA cannot keep one side of the ledger in dollars while setting the other side aside.
For now, the EPA’s message remains consistent: it will still discuss health impacts and track pollution reductions, but it will stop attaching a dollar total to the benefits of cleaner air — at least for PM2.5 and ozone — until it says it can do so with more confidence.