Polluted Science

New air pollution regulations based on questionable science and creative economic analysis could cost billions and change the way Americans mow their lawns, heat their homes, clean their clothes, and barbecue their burgers. Can Congress stop this regulato

Michael Fumento from the August/September 1997 issue

(Page 8 of 12)

Another reason is that by enforcing PM2.5 rules, we could actually be pushing polluters toward creating particles that are more dangerous. According to Robert Phalen, director of the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at the University of California at Irvine, "If it's the ultrafine particles which are highly toxic,"--he means those smaller than PM1.0--"the [PM2.5] regulation could lead to more deaths than lives saved." Diesel engines, he notes, emit particles in the PM2.5 range. In the late 1980s, at the urging of the EPA, new ones were designed that put out smaller particles. "They put out less mass, but they put out 30 to 60 times more particles by number. If the studies indicating that ultrafine particles are the real hazard are correct, changes such as these would make the air more hazardous," says Phalen.

The proposed standards could even kill some of us. Economists have piled up evidence showing that those with more money live longer. "Wealth equals health," goes the saying. Harvard University economist W. Kip Viscusi has calculated that "every $50 million spent on regulation induces one statistical death to the income-mortality connection." In its suppressed memo, the president's Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the cost of full attainment on ozone could be up to $60 billion a year. If so, by Viscusi's calculation it will cost 1,200 lives. A Reason Public Policy Institute report by Kenneth Green, RPPI's director of environmental studies, and University of Southern California systems management professor Ralph Keeney calculated a higher toll: 2,201 Americans for each additional $10 billion spent.

Industry "can talk all they want about costs," one Sierra Club official told the Utility Environment Report."We're going to crush them." Them, their employees, and their customers.

Time Out

Here, in a nutshell, is what science appears to show about particulates:

* Particulates are often associated with increased death and hospitalizations, but often they are not. The same goes for numerous other pollutants.

* To the extent that there is an association with deaths and hospitalizations, it is a consistently weak one--so weak that epidemiologists would generally treat it as having no meaning.

* To the extent that there is an association, few conclusions can be drawn. Ambient particle levels may be a surrogate for adverse weather or other health threats, such as indoor allergens. The cause may be a specific chemical or something else that, in the stampede to regulate PM2.5, will be overlooked.

* Even if one were to conclude that particulates were causing premature death and hospitalizations, it is far from clear that PM2.5 is more closely associated with sickness and mortality than PM10, which is already stringently regulated.

Here, in a smaller nutshell, is what the science appears to show about ozone:

* Although in rare circumstances it may trigger potentially fatal asthma attacks, at the levels found in the United States it is highly unlikely to be killing anyone.

* It does cause a decrease in lung function, to the extent that susceptible individuals in extreme conditions may suffer enough discomfort to go to the hospital.

* Even if there were no man-made ozone at all, naturally present ozone would probably still cause these problems in a certain portion of the population.

There are far fewer particulates of all sizes in the air than there were 10 years ago, far fewer still than 10 years before that, and perhaps one-fiftieth the level London had when it suffered its great 1950s killer "fogs." Without a single new rule, a single new sentence uttered by Carol Browner, or a single new alarming news story, less PM10 and hence less of the PM2.5 subset will be emitted or breathed. All of this is also true for the gases that form ozone. The best that can be hoped for from the new proposed standards is that trends already in place might be accelerated.

Given all this, the case for burdening Americans with tens, maybe hundreds, of billions in costs each year for new regulations seems absurd. Indeed, the very lack of new regulation gives scientists more leeway in choosing what pollutants to research. The fiscal 1998 EPA budget allocates $26.4 million specifically for particulate studies. "Let's take a big time out," says CASAC's McClellan. "[W]e really run a risk of prematurely identifying a new target absent of understanding what that target should be."

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