up to 4,200 premature deaths per year;
270,000 lost workdays per year;
result in as much as $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032.
Well why don’t they just lower it to zero?? As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.
So the EPA does consider it, they just do it in a later step. "Garbage in, garbage out," so you want to make sure your medical science is accurate when it goes into the economic analysis.
I don't understand this: isn't the fact that they didn't lower it to zero strong evidence that they performed a cost-benefit analysis? Where's the evidence that they gave it "no consideration"?
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States
If you even spend, say, $100 Billion on this environmental concern (implicitly valuing $25M/life), you will underinvest in other governmental activities (e.g. DOT) that valued life at $9M/life, so reprogramming funds from air pollution to DOT would be estimated to save more lives. At first SWAG (linearity/hand-waving) implicitly accepting an additional 6000 lives lost due to such a misinvestment.
Just to be clear here not only are costs considered, but they are considered to an absurd degree considering the upsides. The parent just didn't bother to click two links.
Which gives a one sided view of the issue.
This is not because there are no costs, but because the EPA doesn't want to talk about that, and the reporter can't and/or won't do the work to figure it out.
For the same reason we haven't dropped fossil fuel use overnight: It's not practical. You can't just wave a magic regulatory wand to elimination all air pollution without expecting (severe) economic impacts.
> Well why don’t they just lower it to zero??
Because this is the point they concluded would maximize the benefits relative to the costs and downsides.