For MAGA Republicans, the Value of Your and Your Child’s Life = $0. No surprise parents are willing to pay (WTP) much more to avoid harm to their children than to themselves

As reported in the New York Times, “Trump’s EPA has put a value on human life: Zero dollars.” In the past, Democratic and Republican administrations alike put valuations on human lives harmed or ended by pollution. Those values might have seemed too low to some, macabre to others, but factoring in those lives at millions of dollars allowed the EPA to pass hallmark legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, saving countless lives. Still today, air pollution kills 8-10 million globally, but these laws were a huge improvement in the face of the plague of industrialization.

Perversely, in the last month, the EPA stopped factoring in the externalized costs of pollution. In other words, the cost of children dying of asthma, fathers dying of heart attacks, and mothers dying of breast cancer because of industry’s effluence is not factored into the cost of doing business. In other words, industry will be allowed to profit off the deaths of our loved ones more than ever. The only cost that will count will be the cost to business of complying with pollution laws.

At the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC) meeting I attended May 2024, we learned that the Biden EPA was seeking to increase the monetization of child-related adverse health effects. The new system was based on parents’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid harm to their children, rather than just considering the cost of illness (COI) of a child. It turns out, parents are willing to pay much more to avoid risks to their children than risks to themselves, money that far outweighs the sticker price of treatment. These kinds of calculations may seem cold-blooded, but a change of this kind has the effect of protecting children, as the cost of damage to their health is at least weighed against the cost to curtail pollution.

Although this system was not perfect, under Biden, EPA was also working on gradually lessening the amount of PM2.5 that could be legally emitted, preventing an estimated 4,500 premature deaths.

The vast majority of Americans supported these improvements in the air we breathe – 78% of voters, including 84% of Black voters and 75% of Hispanic voters. Most – 72% -- accurately said the new standards would either have a positive impact on the economy or no impact. They believed “the standards will encourage innovation, job growth and new technology rather than hurt the economy.”

It makes one wonder if voters realized they were voting for dirty air when they voted for Trump. Why would they believe his claims to support clean air when he also asked the fossil fuel industry for a billion dollars to get rid of all regulation? Most likely, regular people didn’t consider environmental health at all.

I have always said that I wonder if it does more damage that people think there is an EPA, an environmental protection agency that protects them from harm, than if there were no such agency. Maybe that explains people’s complacency. Now that the current administration is undermining the agency’s core mission to protect human health and the environment, that question has more basis than ever. Now, coal-burning power plants, refineries, incinerators, and other major polluters will be allowed to kill ever more indiscriminately.

It is OBSCENE that my daughter’s life, your lives, your children’s lives, should count for nothing in the fossil-fuel industry’s Machiavellian calculations. This is not utilitarian ethics; this is murder for profit. This is absolute political corruption. This is utter industry capture of the regulatory process. Even in Anglo-Saxon England, a more primitive society in many ways, wergild, or “man-gold,” legally required perpetrators to compensate the families of those killed, deliberately or inadvertently. Even these early versions of justice recognized that some compensation was required to halt the family of the deceased killing members of the rival clan in a perpetual blood feud. In fact, the entire justice system could be said to be predicated on displacing private justice, private revenge. But for that substitution to work, there must be trust in the system.

Our justice system is meant to make it possible to punish perpetrators and to compensate victims. The petrochemical chemical industry is working very hard to preempt any such mechanism through preemption laws, to make it impossible for victims of their depredations and their families to find some measure of justice. For example, if Bayer succeeds in their case before the Supreme Court, appealing a judgment about people harmed by Round-Up, those harmed will have no recourse going forward.

When systems fail this badly, we can expect to see personal vendettas play out – and unfortunately, many will indeed see this as justice, as with Luigi Mangione, whom the internet mob cheered for killing the head of a healthcare company. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future imagines the wrath of climate victims resulting in sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Some might equate destruction of pipelines and refineries with the Resistance blowing up train tracks carrying Holocaust victims to their deaths. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that guerrilla sabotage is a good outcome. I am not fantasizing about blowing things up. Instead, like many, including Bruce Springsteen, I’m inspired by the American tradition of nonviolent resistance. I’m inspired by Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

I will protest with everyone on the side of Good here, No Kings among other groups, because the undemocratic destruction of our ecosystems, communities, and individual bodies are all part of the same thing—the takeover of our government to sustain the dying gasp of decrepit, polluting industries at the expense of the living, breathing planet and all its inhabitants. One reason we are seeing industry capture of our politics is climate change and environmental degradation, as the petrochemical industry anticipates backlash over ecological destruction that causes mass migration.

I don’t think it is time for freedom fighters engaging in ecotage for the planet – yet. But at some point, as democracy increasingly plummets into tyranny, people will and should rebel against a government that deliberately allows industries to profit from the deaths of innocents, from the deaths of their own children, carelessly and indiscriminately slaughtered, from the deaths of all future generations of humans, whom those children justly represent. Hell hath no fury like the parent of a murdered child – and a murdered future.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

-Jean-Marie Kauth

Pledge your support

Photo:  New York City skyline in 1973 and 2013, after the Clean Air Act took effect.