EPA Betrayal
EPA Mandate Overturned
The image accurately summarizes a policy shift reported by major news outlets (including The New York Times, Associated Press, and The Washington Post) on January 12 and 13, 2026.
Verification of Key Claims
The Policy Change: The EPA has officially announced that it will stop "monetizing" (assigning a dollar value to) the health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter ($PM_{2.5}$) and ozone when setting new pollution standards.
Metric Affected: Since the 1980s, the "Value of a Statistical Life" (VSL) has been used to calculate the economic benefits of preventing premature deaths. The EPA is now moving away from this for these specific pollutants, citing "uncertainty" in current scientific modeling.
Focus on Business Costs: By removing the monetary value of saved lives from the "benefits" side of the ledger while continuing to calculate the "costs" to industry for compliance, the agency creates a mathematical imbalance that makes environmental regulations appear much more expensive than they are beneficial.
Impact on Regulation: Experts and internal documents suggest this shift is intended to facilitate the repeal or weakening of limits on coal-burning power plants, refineries, and other industrial facilities.
Official Stance vs. Critics
The EPA’s Justification: Agency spokespeople state they are still "considering" health impacts but will no longer assign them a dollar value until they are "confident enough in the modeling." They argue that previous methods provided a "false sense of precision."
Critics' View: Environmental lawyers and public health advocates describe this as a "stealth repeal" of the Clean Air Act's effectiveness. They argue that by setting the monetary value of a human life at $0$ in their calculations, the EPA is effectively ignoring its core mission of protecting human health.
Conclusion
While the headline in the image uses strong language ("will no longer consider impacts"), it is a common journalistic summary of the EPA's decision to stop monetizing those impacts. In the context of federal cost-benefit analysis—which determines whether a rule is legally "appropriate"—refusing to assign a dollar value to a benefit is often functionally equivalent to not considering it in the final decision-making math.
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