Rivers Unlimited

Lives in the Balance

It is difficult to place a price on human life, because all lives are precious, but in our financially driven society money seems to be the primary measure of how business and government measure our worth.

That said, let's look at various dollar values assigned a human life:

- $6.1 million, USEPA (2000) in its arsenic calculations, Clinton Administration
- $3.7 million, USEPA (2002) Bush Administration
- $3.0 million, USDOT, date unknown, in figuring highway deaths
- $2.3 million, USEPA (2002) if you are over 70

According to USEPA figures as reported in the New York Times on April 4, 2004, "Public health researchers estimate that fine-particulate pollution emissions from power plants shorten the lives of more than 30,000 Americans every year."

Mother Jones magazine recently reported, "The estimated amount that Clear Skies-related health problems will cost taxpayers per year - $115 billion." Clear Skies is the government's new plan for allegedly clean air. I am not sure that these costs take into account mercury poisoning from power plant emissions precipitating onto lands and flowing into surface waters where we catch and eat fish.

Now consider that a new scrubber for a power plant can cut emissions up to 95%. This would come at a cost to major polluting power plants in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Next, let's review the campaign contributions to the party in power from major utilities, which amounted to about $7 million as reported in the March 6, 2004, New York Times article entitled "How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at the E.P.A."

Thus, for a mere $7 million dollars (or the equivalent of 2 lives) the utility industry has bought a decision that will cause 30,000 deaths and $115 billion a year in health-related costs. All this unnecessary misery and suffering so these corporations can save a few hundred million that they should have invested in their plants up to 20 years ago under New Source Review (NSR). Today, they refuse to upgrade their plants. The Bush Administration's answer is to quietly change the law and drop pending lawsuits against the utilities. It's a national scandal.
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The government is said to favor benefit/cost analysis in its decisions. That is basic to the science of economics and makes sense in many ways. All of us perform benefit/cost unconsciously in our daily decisions.

Does it look to you that our government has used benefit/cost in writing the Clear Skies regulation? If they had, the costs to society and our people would calculate out like this:

30,000 lives lost
x $3,000,000 per life
= $90,000,000,000 subtotal
+ $115,000,000,000 in health costs
= $205,000,000,000 annual cost to American society

That's year after year, as compared to the one-time investment of hundreds of millions in equipment, followed by annual operating costs, required of the utilities.

So the government is invoking a regulation that will cost us somewhere between 200 and 600 times as much as the corporations' bottom lines will benefit. We will pay with our lives and our public health, to say nothing of our quality of life. Is there any doubt that a double standard that favors the public utilities and harms our citizens is being forced upon us?

For those of you who need more convincing, here are some more figures to contemplate:
Health care costs in the U.S. are $1.65 trillion a year, about 1/6th of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Power plant emissions cause $205 billion in damages per year or 1/8th of our health care costs. Society struggles to contain spiraling health care costs but guess who pays the bills with tax dollars and lives? We do.

It's clear that the government cannot be using the value of human life in its benefit/cost calculations. It cannot even be using the health care costs. It should. It is deeply unpatriotic of our policy makers to condemn 30,000 people to death each year (10 times as many as died on 9-11), by refusing to adopt pollution controls that protect the environment and the public health.

The numbers are staggering, especially put in the perspective of war: the Vietnam War took 58,000 lives; the War in Iraq is at 770 and counting. Is the current president, who fashions himself as a war president, waging an environmental war against his own citizens?

One burning question, and the subject of much counter spin by utilities, is would preventing the loss of such life put fossil-fuel burning utilities out of business? Hardly. Would prices go up? Not if they were properly regulated. Originally, they were "public" utilities, designed to serve the needs of the public. Now they're nests for the enrichment of corporate kings and for the profit of their shareholders, and tools to support politicians who will favor their interests.

Should we take the statistical death costs out of the equation because they are theoretical - or inconvenient to industry's goals? If so, does that mean a human life has zero value? Is that what our government has done?

Why should we accept such carnage - in the name of utility profits and campaign contributions! It is simply indefensible. It is an outrage!
posted by Mike at 3:33 PM