We will be blogging individual articles from The League Line, our quarterly newsletter
~Louis A. Zeller, Executive Director
July 2020
There is another global pandemic. Like COVID-19, it is filling hospitals and causing deaths around the world. Although its cause is not a virus, the illness it inflicts on the population can likewise be mitigated and even prevented with available and economical means, if only the necessary steps were taken to put an end to a ghastly calculus.
Pollution. Air, water and soil contamination caused by industrial, commercial and transportation sources are responsible for 9 million deaths per year—triple that of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and fifteen times the total of wars and other deadly violence worldwide.**
This toll of human suffering is not solely an environmental issue; it is a public health, humanitarian, social justice and moral problem which demands our attention. The means of reversing and correcting pollution-caused illness have been implemented in nations with the political will to do so. Fifty years ago, a grassroots outcry helped to create the political consensus necessary to enact legislation on air pollution, water pollution, waste management and other controls badly needed in the United States. These measures forced changes, ending business as usual. However, we took our eye off the ball. Today these sensible measures are in jeopardy. In the legal and technical analysis presented in Priceless:*
“At the start of the 21st Century, the clock is starting to run backwards as laws and regulations protecting health, safety and the natural environment…are now under attack. The attackers do not explicitly advocate pollution, illness and natural degradation; instead, they call for more ‘economic analysis.’”
Such economic analyses are designed to favor the bottom lines of corporate persons over the well-being of human persons. People seeking to protect their neighbors and families are confronted with vague claims of economic growth and jobs. The claims are often specious but crudely effective, and environmentalists are framed as being not-in-my-backyard or worse. Never mind that job loss simply cannot be tied to environmental policy or regulations.
According to the US EPA, financial estimates of reductions in death rates are tallied as the "value of a statistical life”; that is, the dollar amount a given number of people would pay to save one life in the group annually. Here is the mathematical formula used to make annual adjustments in a given group:
Where:
0 = Original Base Year
T = Updated Base Year
Pt = Price Index in Year t
It = Real Incomes in Year t
Ɛ = Income Elasticity of VSL
Although presented and described as a neutral formula for determining risk, the analysis ignores a fundamental truth. Again, in Priceless:* “The basic problem with narrow economic analysis of health and environmental protection is that human life, health and nature cannot be described meaningfully in economic terms; they are priceless.”
The reality, the moral dilemma, facing global society is that the so-called statistical person, the one-in-a-million whose life is cut short, is someone’s brother, sister, parent or child. An act of violence which no one would accept as the price to be paid for weed-free lawns, electric lights or paved roads is no less abhorrent because it is calculated and methodical. To know the price of something means little without comprehending its real value to others. It is to know nothing.
Sources - Director’s Report:
*Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, The New Press, 7/15/2005, ISBN-1565849817
**British medical journal, The Lancet, Commission on Pollution and Health, 2018;391: 462-512
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