The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently released an announcement outlining its newly proposed carbon pollution standards for fossil fuels. If you are trying to figure out how to categorize the new paper, you might try filing it under “fiction,” because the agency just makes stuff up.
In its press release, the EPA asserts, “The proposal for coal and new natural gas power plants would avoid up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide (CO2) through 2042. … The proposals would also result in cutting tens of thousands of tons of particulate matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide, harmful air pollutants that are known to endanger people’s health.”
The proposed new rules, if they survive review and the public-comment process, may reduce CO2 and particulate matter, but the agency’s other claims are bogus at best: “In 2030 alone, the proposed standards would prevent”:
- approximately 1,300 premature deaths;
- more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits;
- more than 300,000 cases of asthma attacks;
- 38,000 school absence days;
- 66,000 lost workdays.
So, the agency is telling us that in seven years, its new pollution-reduction standards would prevent more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits and 300,000 asthma attacks.
How could any econometric model accurately predict how many fewer hospital and emergency room visits there will be seven years from now? Or how many fewer asthma attacks?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates there were 10.3 million asthma attacks in the United States in 2020, compared to 10.7 million seven years earlier in 2014. The estimated number of attacks actually declined between 2014 and 2020, without the EPA’s new restrictions. So, any further decline over the next seven years, were it to occur, could just be the continuation of a trend.
The EPA’s prediction of fewer hospital and emergency room visits borders on the ridiculous. The CDC says there were 131.3 million emergency room visits in 2020. The EPS’s estimate of 800 fewer visits in 2030 is less than a rounding error.*
Economists use econometric models to test the impact of various types of economic policies. The models are almost always wrong in their predictions, but some are closer than others.
And then there are predictions, like the recent one from the EPA, that aren’t even as good as a wild swing in the dark.
The EPA puts out these fictional estimates so that President Biden and Democrats can toss around some authoritative-sounding numbers when pushing their radical agenda, because they know that voters would soundly reject those proposals if they knew the truth.
*Even if the EPA only focused on asthma-related emergency room visits, there was an average of 1,656,920 asthma-related emergency room visits annually between 2016 and 2018.