The fallout from EPA's pollution shift

Driving the news: The agency stopped assigning — for now — monetary estimates of the health benefits of avoided ozone and fine particulate pollution, narrowing its focus to the costs to the industry.

• The policy surfaced this month in revised standards for power turbines, but could affect more wide-ranging air quality decisions ahead.
• Those could include how much coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, and other industrial sites are allowed to emit.

The big picture: Whether it's a risky public health retreat or a needed bow to the limits of regulators' models is in the eye of the beholder.

• Health and green groups slammed the decision. It robs the public of understanding the gains of cutting pollution from factories, power plants, cars and more, they say.
• It breaks with decades of practices, though scholars with the think tank Resources For the Future (RFF) note a limited number of Trump 1.0 decisions excluded various benefit tallies.
• Some former EPA officials, however, say the impact could be indirect, or might not actually steer the regulations in a different direction.

Threat level: "Such an approach tilts the analysis in favor of less stringent regulation," two RFF senior fellows said in a new post.

• Harvard's Carrie Jenks said the approach wrongly implies that cost estimates are more precise than benefits tallies.
• "From a practical perspective, there is a risk that ignoring one side of the ledger undermines the ability of decision makers to make fully informed decisions," Jenks, who heads Harvard's Environmental & Energy Law Program, said in an email.

What we're watching: The shift arrives as EPA is reconsidering and rewriting a suite of Biden-era policies with an eye toward making them less aggressive.

• But it's unclear what this means for any specific rule.
• "In recent years, EPA's calculations about the monetized benefits haven't really been used to make regulatory decisions. They have mostly been used in the Agency's efforts to get public and political support for their rules," said attorney Jeff Holmstead, a senior air official in the George W. Bush EPA.
• "I don't think the new policy will change the outcome of any rulemakings, but it may take away one of the arguments that would otherwise be used against the Trump EPA," Holmstead, a partner with Bracewell LLC, said in an email.

The intrigue: The effect of no longer estimating PM 2.5 and ozone benefits will depend on what kind of regulatory change is under consideration, a former longtime EPA official now with RFF said.

• RFF senior fellow Bryan Hubbell said it doesn't have a "direct impact" on the legality of decisions around national air quality standards.
• "But it does affect the ability to talk to the public about what it means to set standards, and what the implications of meeting those standards will be for their health," said Hubbell, who was at EPA for 27 years until mid-2025.

• He also notes that estimating a range of monetary benefits helps EPA decide on the wider trajectory of its policies.

Yes, but: The agency and its backers say the change recognizes the limits of what regulators don't know.

• Past practices "often provided the public with a false sense of precision and more confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone than the underlying science could fully support, especially as overall emissions have significantly decreased," the rule states.

"Because of the significant impacts of environmental regulations on the U.S. economy, it is essential that the Agency have confidence in the estimated benefits of an action prior to utilizing these estimates in a regulatory context," it states.

• An agency spokesperson tells Axios: "Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact."
• EPA said it will resume monetizing once updated models meet "rigorous" standards, but didn't provide a time frame.

Catch up quick: Past estimates often show huge public-health gains relative to costs.

• For instance, in early 2024, EPA estimated that tightening exposure standards for fine particulates would bring $22 billion to $46 billion in net benefits in 2032, relative to $590 million in compliance costs.

Friction point: EPA noted that some Biden-era rules didn't provide monetary benefits tallies, either.

• But Hubbell and other experts said this was case-dependent, not a wider policy similar to what EPA appears to have just unveiled.

What's next: Environmental groups are signaling potential lawsuits over EPA's action.