Monetary Cost of Air Pollution's Health Impacts Dropped from EPA Assessments (January 2026)
healthpolicy-watch.news

...The US EPA, whose path-finding work on air pollution's health impacts helped set standards internationally, will no longer put dollar amounts to the human health toll of the most hazardous air pollutants, PM 2.5 and ozone, in the course of setting new regulations or assessing the health harms of potentially polluting energy projects, the agency signalled on Monday.

The sea change in four decades of policy was included in a new economic assessment of new emissions standards for gas turbines, which fine-tunes and strengthens slightly regulations on nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, but avoids setting explicit limits for emissions of fine particles, PM2.5, widely considered the most health-hazardous air pollutant.

The costs to industry of the updated rule will amount to roughly $22.6 million annually, the assessment states. But it refrains from making any monetary estimate of health costs and benefits, stating:

"The EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts." ...