EPA Shouldn’t Try to Hide Benefits of Clean Air: Editorial

The Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to stop quantifying the health benefits of regulating soot and ozone is a victory for polluters and a loss for the public. Masking the benefits will make it easier for the EPA to defend lax regulations on toxic emissions but harder to make America healthy again. More people will get sick and die, and the EPA will bear some of the blame.

For decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the EPA has conducted cost-benefit analyses of its air-pollution regulations. Fewer asthma attacks, for instance, produce lower medical costs, less missed work and higher productivity rates. ...