It's the Brian Lera Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So there's some pretty big news coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency about how they'll calculate costs when setting air pollution

limits. For decades, the EPA has considered how many lives can be saved by reducing air pollution

to justify regulations that promote clean air. But according to an investigation by the New York

Times, the EPA under President Trump now has

ended this practice, making it easier to repeal limits on pollutants from coal-burning power

plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and more to repeal those limits.

With us now to share her reporting on the change in rules.

At the EPA is Maxine Jossalo, New York Times

reporter covering climate policy. Maxine, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for having me back on the show,

Brian. I'm just going to ask you to explain right at the start what's changed here, because when we

read that the cost in terms of lives saved is not going to be taken into account anymore in air pollution,

air pollution rulemaking, all I can do is look at that and say, what?

So for the past four and a half or so decades, the EPA has done what's called a cost-benefit analysis when it's crafting new regulations.

And this involves looking at the costs of complying with the regulation for businesses, including utilities that might own power plants, for example, and also calculating the health benefits of the regulation.

For example, in the case of clean air regulations, there are often really significant benefits, including thousands of avoided premature deaths every year, hundreds of

avoided asthma attacks every year. The list goes on. And in a really fundamental seismic change,

the EPA under the second Trump administration is effectively going to stop calculating the health

benefits and only look at the cost

to industry. So they're really only going to be looking at one side of the ledger in the cost

benefit analysis as opposed to looking at the costs and seeing how they balance out against the

benefits. Does the Clean Air Act even allow that? That is a great question,

one that I tried to ask a number of environmental lawyers and experts as I was reporting out

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