For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has calculated the health benefits of clean air when crafting pollution rules. Those benefits include fewer asthma attacks, heart conditions, hospitalizations, and premature deaths.

Now, under the Trump administration, the EPA is removing those health benefits from the equation.

According to internal documents and emails obtained by The New York Times, the EPA will no longer assign value to lives saved from reduced air pollution — including deadly pollutants like PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) and ozone. These are the very pollutants linked to thousands of premature deaths every year.

Instead, the EPA will only calculate what it costs polluters to comply with air pollution limits — not what it costs Americans to breathe dirty air.

This is a fundamental betrayal of the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment.

Under the new policy:

Lives lost to pollution will be invisible on paper
Industry costs will outweigh public benefits by design
Dangerous rollbacks of clean-air standards will become easier to justify
Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote that agencies must consider both costs and benefits when regulating. Ignoring human health entirely is not just immoral — it may be illegal.

We are calling on:

• The EPA to reverse this deadly policy and restore the full accounting of lives saved and health protected
• Congress to investigate the rollback and take legislative action to protect the EPA’s core mission.

State attorneys general and environmental watchdogs to prepare legal challenges against any rules issued under this one-sided system
If our government stops counting lives, it stops protecting them.

Sign this petition to demand that the EPA count lives — not just industry profits — when setting pollution rules. Our lungs, our children, and our future depend on it.