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Romney Falsely Claims Health Benefits of Utility MACT Are Due to Bankrupting Coal Companies -- Not Pollution Reduction Equipmentby Ben SombergMitt Romney added a new twist Tuesday to false right-wing claims about the EPA’s regulation limiting mercury and other pollutants from coal power plants. EPA estimated that the “utility MACT” will have annual monetized benefits of $37-90 billion and costs of $9.6 billion. A critique we’ve heard over and over again from the industry and its supporters goes something like this: “But only $6 million of those benefits come from reducing mercury pollution, the top target of the rule!” It’s sort of an odd critique, but it’s misleading anyway: the mercury numbers are so low because EPA simply didn’t monetize most of the mercury reduction benefits. Putting a dollar value on not poisoning kids with a neurotoxin is difficult or impossible, and the benefits of the rule far outweigh the costs already anyway. Now here’s the twist. On Tuesday, the website sciencedebate.org, a consortium of concerned groups, published responses from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to a questionnaire on science issues. Romney repeated the common right-wing Utility MACT argument (see question 11), and added a different argument:
The EPA estimated that the health benefits of the rule include averting 4,200 - 11,000 premature deaths, 130,000 asthma attacks, and 540,000 missed work sick days – each year. Romney is saying that those calculations of prevented deaths rely on a trick: they are achieved because the affected coal plants would simply shut down. That is, it turns out, not how EPA’s calculations for the rule work. As the agency explains (p.17):
The overwhelming majority of the rule’s health benefits – including those averted deaths that Romney is skeptical of – will come because dirty power plants will finally be required to install pollution control equipment. Many states have already successfully implemented such requirements. The “bankrupt” line does make for a more sinister sounding story, though.
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