News Archive

An editorial in the Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, Fla.) alerted readers to threats to air quality as the   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to reconsider how it weighs the cost of power-plant emission rules against their public-health benefits.

The editorial cited IU McKinney Professor of Practice Janet McCabe to make its case that Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, were strengthened under the Obama administration, and, as a result, mercury emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants declined by 77 percent, according to the EPA’s own estimates.

“But the Trump administration’s EPA — headed by Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist — contends that the Obama administration’s cost-benefit analysis was incorrect. The agency now says the cost of MATS “grossly outweighs” health benefit savings, which it estimates at about $4 million to $6 million per year,” the editorial said.

“Janet McCabe, acting assistant EPA administrator for air quality during the Obama administration, told Power Magazine that the current rule was based on requirements signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and that the new proposal sets ‘a very troubling precedent’ for how the EPA evaluates the impact of policy on public health.

“The current EPA,” she said, “is going against what has been the required practice for several decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, of considering all the public health benefits of a rule, and is now being selective in deciding which public health benefits should count — and which shouldn’t.”

Professor McCabe is Assistant Director for Policy and Implementation at IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute. She is also a Senior Law Fellow with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.