Frack Check WV » Cost benefit analysis

Fine & Ultra-fine Particles Affect our Body and Brain

Duane Nichols — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 18:21:12 +0000

Particles Transported to the Brain

The Polluted Brain is Under Intense Study

From an Article by Emily Underwood, Science Magazine, January 26, 2017

Los Angeles, CA—In a barbed wire–enclosed parking lot 100 meters downwind of the Route 110 freeway, an aluminum hose sticks out of a white trailer, its nozzle aimed at an overpass. Every minute, the hose sucks up hundreds of liters of air mixed with exhaust from the roughly 300,000 cars and diesel-burning freight trucks that rumble by each day.

Crouched inside the trailer, a young chemical engineer named Arian Saffari lifts the lid off a sooty cylinder attached to the hose, part of a sophisticated filtration system that captures and sorts pollutants by size. Inside is a scientific payload: particles of sulfate, nitrate, ammonium, black carbon, and heavy metal at least 200 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The particles are too fine for many air pollution sensors to accurately measure, says Saffari, who works in a lab led by Constantinos Sioutas at the University of Southern California (USC) here. Typically smaller than 0.2 µm in diameter, these “ultrafine” particles fall within a broader class of air pollutants commonly referred to as PM2.5 because of their size, 2.5 µm or less. When it comes to toxicity, size matters: The smaller the particles that cells are exposed to, Saffari says, the higher their levels of oxidative stress, marked by the production of chemically reactive molecules such as peroxides, which can damage DNA and other cellular structures.

Some of the health risks of inhaling fine and ultrafine particles are well-established, such as asthma, lung cancer, and, most recently, heart disease. But a growing body of evidence suggests that exposure can also harm the brain, accelerating cognitive aging, and may even increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial—even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there.

But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, USC researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standard of 12 µg/m³ nearly doubled dementia risk in older women.

If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide, says the study’s senior author, epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

Deepening the concerns, this month researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada reported in The Lancet that among 6.6 million people in the province of Ontario, those living within 50 meters of a major road—where levels of fine pollutants are often 10 times higher than just 150 meters away—were 12% more likely to develop dementia than people living more than 200 meters away.

The field is “very, very young,” cautions Michelle Block, a neuroscientist at Indiana University in Indianapolis. Nonetheless, it’s a “hugely exciting time” to study the connections between pollution and the brain, she says. And if real, the air pollution connection would give public health experts a tool for sharply lowering Alzheimer’s risks—a welcome prospect for a disease that is so devastating and that, for now, remains untreatable.

Demented dogs in Mexico City in the early 2000s offered the first hints that inhaling polluted air can cause neurodegeneration. Neuroscientist Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, now at the University of Montana in Missoula, noticed that aging dogs who lived in particularly polluted areas of the city often became addled, growing disoriented and even losing the ability to recognize their owners. When the dogs died, Calderón-Garcidueñas found that their brains had more extensive extracellular deposits of the protein amyloid b—the same “plaques” associated with Alzheimer’s disease—than dogs in less polluted cities.

She went on to find similarly elevated plaque levels in the brains of children and young adults from Mexico City who had died in accidents, as well as signs of inflammation such as hyperactive glia, the brain’s immune cells. Calderón-Garcidueñas’s studies didn’t have rigorous controls, or account for the fact that amyloid b plaques don’t necessarily signal dementia. But later work lent weight to her observations.

Those tubes of fine particles from the Route 110 freeway have played a key role. In a basement lab at USC, Sioutas and his team aerosolize the pollutants with a hospital nebulizer, then pipe the dirty air into the cages housing lab mice that have been engineered to contain a gene for human amyloid b. Control animals housed in the same room breathe clean, filtered air. After a designated period—220 hours over several weeks, in a recent experiment—the team hands the rodents over to colleagues at USC, who kill the animals and check their brains for signs of neuro-degeneration.

Caleb Finch and Todd Morgan, USC neuroscientists who combine studies of aging and the brain, are in charge of the analysis. In mice that breathed the dirty air, they have found, the brain’s microglia release a flood of inflammatory molecules, including tumor necrosis factor a, which is elevated in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and has been linked to memory loss. The pollution-exposed mice also showed other signs of brain damage, the group has reported in several recent papers: more amyloid b than in the control mice and shrunken and atrophied neurites, the cellular processes that extend from neurons toward other cells.

Just how the fine airborne particles might travel from a rodent’s nasal cavity to its brain is a mystery. But a research team led by Günter Oberdörster at the University of Rochester in New York has used traceable, radioactive specks of elemental carbon to demonstrate that inhaled particles smaller than 200 nanometers can get through the delicate tissues lining a rodent’s nasal cavities, travel along neurons, and spread as far as the cerebellum, at the back of the brain, triggering an inflammatory reaction.

To understand what the animal studies might mean for people, however, scientists need to correlate air pollution exposure with human brain scans and with results from rigorous cognitive testing.

That’s not easy to do, as long-term, historical data on pollution exposures are scarce in the United States and many other countries, says Kimberly Gray, a program administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Durham, North Carolina.

But in a September 2016 review of 18 epidemiological studies from Taiwan, Sweden, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all but one showed an association between high exposure to at least one component of air pollution and a sign of dementia. The review, published in Neurotoxicology, included a 2012 analysis of 19,000 retired U.S. nurses, which found that the more fine particulates the nurses were exposed to, based on monitoring data near their homes, the faster they declined on cognitive tests. For every additional 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air they breathed, their performance on tests of memory and attention declined as if they had aged by 2 years, says Jennifer Weuve, an epidemiologist at Boston University, who led the analysis.

Imaging studies also suggest that pollution attacks the human brain. In a 2015 analysis of brain MRI scans of people enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term cardiovascular study in New England, researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston found that the closer people had lived to a major roadway—and thus the more PM2.5 they had likely been exposed to—the smaller their cerebral brain volume. The association held up even after adjusting for factors such as education, smoking, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Shortly after that study was published, USC’s Chen reported another example of brain shrinkage: In 1403 elderly women, the total volume of white matter—the insulated nerve fibers that connect different brain regions—decreased by about 6 cubic centimeters for every 3.5-µg/m³ increase in estimated PM2.5 exposure, based on air monitoring data from participants’ residences for 6 to 7 years before the brain scans were taken. Chen’s white matter findings are consistent with studies of cultured neurons, which show that exposure to PM2.5 can cause myelin—the fatty insulation that wraps around neuronal axons—to “peel up at the ends, like a Band-Aid,” Block says.

I think [air pollution] will turn out to be just the same as tobacco—there’s no safe threshold, said Caleb Finch, University of Southern California.

Three Examples Show Pruitt is Unfit to Head EPA

S. Tom Bond — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 15:50:47 +0000

CO2 Levels & Surface Temperature

Pruitt’s EPA Lawsuits Are Worse Than You Think

From an Article by Ken Kimmell, Union of Concerned Scientists, January 17, 2017

One well-reported thing about Scott Pruitt, President-elect Trump‘s nominee for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, is his penchant for filing lawsuits to block the EPA from enforcing clean air, clean water and climate regulations, rather than suing polluters in his own state of Oklahoma.

This alone ought to provide ample grounds for rejecting his nomination. But a closer look at these lawsuits and the legal arguments Pruitt has advanced (or signed onto) tells an even more disturbing story. The legal arguments are disingenuous, often unprincipled and extreme, and display an unfortunate strategy of saying just about anything to win a case.

Consider these three examples.

Pruitt Takes on Climate Scientists: The 2010 Lawsuit Challenging the EPA’s “Endangerment” Finding

In 2009, the EPA made a long overdue, and wholly unremarkable finding that greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels may endanger public health and welfare. In this finding, the EPA acknowledged the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community and the multiple lines of independent evidence supporting this conclusion.

While the finding broke no new ground scientifically, it was important legally: when the EPA finds that a pollutant endangers public health or welfare, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate sources of that pollutant. In this case, that meant power plants, cars, trucks and other sources that combust coal, oil and natural gas.

To stop such regulation in its tracks, Scott Pruitt filed a lawsuit to overturn the endangerment finding, which he and his fellow litigants characterized as “arbitrary and capricious.” Believe it or not, Pruitt’s primary argument was that the EPA should not have relied upon the multiple reports on climate change issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (established by the United Nations which synthesizes the work of thousands of scientists), the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) (a Bush administration body of 13 federal agencies that issued 21 reports on climate change)vand the National Research Council (NRC) (the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences).

Pruitt’s legal brief never quite explains what is wrong with relying upon the world’s most prominent experts, but it claimed that the EPA in effect wrongly delegated its decision-making to these bodies.

Here are the rather sharp words the court used when it unanimously dismissed this claim:

This argument is little more than a semantic trick. EPA simply did here what it and other decision makers often must do to make a science-based judgment: it sought out and reviewed existing scientific evidence to determine whether a particular finding was warranted. It makes no difference that much of the scientific evidence in large part consisted of “syntheses” of individual studies and research. Even individual studies and research papers often synthesize past work in an area and then build upon it. This is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question. [Page 27]

Take a moment to digest this: the person nominated to head the EPA sued that agency because it relied upon the work of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists when making a finding regarding the most important scientific question of our lifetime—whether humans are causing global warming.

Pruitt’s Lawsuits to Block Mercury Reductions Using a Rigged Cost-Benefit Analysis

Mercury has long been known to be one of the most potent neurotoxins: ingestion of even very small amounts can have devastating effects, particularly on children. Coal and oil-fired power plants are responsible for more than 50 percent of the mercury emissions in the U.S., which travel long distances and deposit in water bodies, leading to ingestion by fish and humans who consume fish. There is effective technology that many power plants use to control mercury and other toxic pollutants, but approximately forty percent of existing power plants do not use it.

In 1990 Congress amended the Clean Air Act to specifically authorize the EPA to address mercury emissions (and other air toxics), but no progress was made due to EPA delays and litigation. In 2011, the Obama Administration issued a rule to cut mercury emissions from power plants.

The rule required approximately 40 percent of existing power plants to install the same proven controls that the other 60 percent had already adopted. The EPA estimated that it would avert up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 asthma attacks every year.

Scott Pruitt and others launched a lawsuit to prevent the EPA from cutting mercury and toxic air pollutants from power plants. He scored an initial victory on a technicality—the EPA had failed to consider cost of regulation at the preliminary stage when it was considering whether to regulate mercury. (I call this a technicality, because the EPA did perform a formal cost benefit analysis at the later stage when it issued the regulation).

The EPA subsequently complied with the court order and used an updated analysis to support the rule. The analysis showed “monetized” benefits of between $37-90 billion versus a cost of $9 billion.

Unsatisfied, Pruitt filed a second lawsuit, this time taking aim at the cost benefit analysis. As was the case with the endangerment finding, Pruitt’s attack led with an absurd argument—this time about cost benefit analysis.

When the EPA tallied up the costs of the regulation, it included direct costs, like the cost of installing the pollution control, and indirect costs, like higher electricity prices. Similarly, when the EPA calculated the benefits of the regulation, it considered direct benefits, like improved public health from mercury reduction, but also indirect benefits, like reductions in other pollutants such as smog and sulfur dioxide because the pollution control technology used for mercury also reduces these pollutants.

Source: http://www.ecowatch.com/pruitt-epa-lawsuits-2197643441.html

The Social Cost of Carbon: Setting the Record Straight

Duane Nichols — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:56:17 +0000

: Social Cost of Carbon from 2010 to 2050

The Social Cost of Carbon: Setting the Record Straight

From Rachel Cleetus, The Equation Blog, Union of Concerned Scientists, July 18, 2013

The Obama administration has recently updated the official U.S. social cost of carbon (SCC), which attempts to estimate the costs of damage from carbon pollution. It’s one important way to show the value of cutting our global warming emissions. We’ll need to keep improving the SCC estimate to ensure it reflects the latest science and economics. We also have to ensure a more transparent process for updating and using this critical number going forward. But today’s House hearing on the SCC is simply a sideshow aimed at undermining climate action, not likely to focus on issues of substance.

Why the Social Cost of Carbon is Important

These SCC calculations are important for evaluating the costs of activities that cause heat-trapping emissions, and therefore important for evaluating the benefits of any policies that would reduce the amount of those emissions going into the atmosphere. Currently, they are included in the cost-benefit analyses that accompany many federal rulemakings to help evaluate the benefits of reductions in CO₂ emissions from agency rules.

For example, the recently-issued microwave efficiency standards included a calculation of these benefits that amounted to $58.4 million per year (in 2011 dollars) for 38.1 million metric tons of CO₂ reductions from 2016-2045, using a 3 percent discount rate and a value of $41.1/ton of CO₂ for the SCC.

Cost-benefit analysis has been a staple of agency rulemakings (conducted as part of the regulatory impact analysis) since President Reagan was in office, and often championed by conservatives. They are an important economic tool to help make decisions on pollution standards, although they require putting a monetary value on every item included. Of course, a cost-benefit analysis shouldn’t always be the sole criteria for making regulatory decisions – for example, in the case of toxic pollutants, setting a health-based standard would be the ideal approach. The Clean Air Act allows for this distinction.

Without an SCC estimate, by default we would be using a value of zero, implying that carbon pollution has no costs. That is patently not the case, as pointed out by numerous studies that outline the health and economic impacts of climate change.

It’s also important to recognize that recent regulations that have included carbon reduction benefits in their benefit-cost calculations show benefits exceeding costs by a wide margin whether or not carbon benefits are included. For example, the microwave efficiency standards had benefits that outweighed costs by a factor of 3 to 1, without including any benefits from CO₂ reductions (See table 1.2.1 here).

The Numbers: The U.S. Government SCC Estimates

In February 2010, the administration released its previous estimate of the social cost of carbon. The new SCC estimates are higher (see chart below). In 2020, the old estimate was $26.3/ton CO2 and the new estimate is $43/ton CO2 (both in 2007 dollars, at a 3 percent discount rate). In both cases the values grow over time to reflect growing damage costs as climate change worsens.

The increase in the new social cost of carbon (SCC) estimate is broadly consistent with what we’re seeing in the scientific and economic literature on the growing risks and costs of climate change, and in fact is very likely an underestimate of the true cost of our carbon emissions.

The increase is also consistent with the costs of climate change that we are already experiencing, such as those associated with sea level rise and rising temperatures. Climate change is making coastal flooding, extreme heat, extreme precipitation, and other weather events worse, while we have more people and property in harm’s way.

Based on the latest science we can expect future SCC estimates to be higher

Climate change is contributing to the conditions that cause drought. Last year’s drought in America cost over $30 billion.

If the calculations continue to follow the latest science and economics, we can expect them to rise as more carbon goes into the atmosphere and the Earth continues to warm. As methods to evaluate and quantify climate impacts improve, that will also raise damage costs.

A warmer world is also a world with more taxpayer dollars going to disaster aid, more spending on emergency response, and higher costs for homeowners and businesses. Hopefully, we will take measures to avoid runaway increases in those social costs by making deep cuts in our carbon emissions and finding ways to help protect communities from growing climate risks.

What was the process for determining and updating the SCC estimates?

The process for arriving at the original SCC estimate and updating it involved a large number of agencies whose rulemakings are likely to be impacted by this calculation or who have expertise on the subject. These include the Council of Economic Advisers, Council on Environmental Quality, Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Economic Council, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Department of the Treasury.

The interagency working group arrived at their estimates using three commonly-used integrated assessment models (IAMs), which economist refer to by their acronyms: PAGE, DICE and FUND. In general, these models use scenarios of carbon emissions and associated projections for key climate factors (such as global average temperature and precipitation changes) which drive a variety of impacts in different sectors (such as public health, agriculture, etc.) and then arrive at dollar values for the impacts per unit of carbon (CO₂) based on the relevant scientific and economic literature.

Integrated assessment models can be improved

The models differ in their specifics and none of them are able to capture and evaluate all the major categories of impacts. There are also problems with which climate factors are incorporated, the way they are used, and whether they are appropriately downscaled at a local level. For example, timing of precipitation over the course of the year matters for agriculture, not just the average annual amount of rainfall in a given year. The global average sea level rise (8 inches since 1880) also masks significant local variation (for example, in the U.S. we have experienced local sea level rise of 10 inches to 46 inches in places along the East and Gulf coasts). Improving the way climate factors are accounted for in these models could raise the SCC by orders of magnitude.

It’s also the case that IAMs don’t reflect just how devastating unchecked climate change will be. For instance, some economic analyses assume that areas of the planet will remain economically productive, even under a worst-case warming scenario. It’s hard to imagine people will want to keep doing business in an underwater city or that we’ll still have economic activity in places that are too hot and humid for people to walk outside for more than a few minutes without suffering from heat stroke. Similarly, the standard models do not capture risks of low-probability but high-impact events, so-called climate “tipping points,” such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of vast stores of methane trapped under the melting permafrost, or radical changes in the jet stream or ocean currents that could affect major weather patterns like the monsoons.

Ways to improve the process for arriving at SCC estimates

The interagency process for determining the SCC estimates to date has involved a number of experts, and at least three workshops. Yet it has not allowed for clear opportunities for public comment and input. This should be remedied. But that in no way takes away from the fact that we need a science-based estimate of the SCC, prepared in a timely fashion, for use in the cost-benefit analyses for regulations.

There are a number of draft and upcoming regulations that will use the social cost of carbon in evaluating the benefits of the regulation. As agencies solicit comment on all aspects of the regulations, experts should and will certainly have the opportunity to weigh in specifically on the social cost of carbon – its use, the estimates, the methodology, and any relevant science and economics. Another additional option could be to have a transparently organized external expert review process for calculating and updating the SCC in the future, and with all comments made public (though anonymous). The expert review panel could be organized in a similar manner to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, for example.

The models used to calculate the SCC are not perfect, and economists are still trying to catch up with advances in climate science, but they are important tools that can help improve decision-making if used appropriately. Just like the Federal Reserve uses models to set interest rates and baseball managers use models to evaluate a player’s expected performance, models like these can help shed light on future scenarios so policy makers can make better decisions. While the economic models we use to examine climate change and its impacts and costs will keep being updated, it would be a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, experience has shown that every time these models are improved to better reflect the latest science, the SCC estimates are shown to be higher. Other insights from economics that evaluate optimal choices in the face of catastrophic risks should also be incorporated.

Addressing global warming requires a global perspective on costs and benefits of emissions

Global warming is a global problem. The impacts of our carbon emissions are spread around the world so it’s commonsense to use a global estimate of costs. This is consistent with regulatory statutes and has the endorsement of a large number of government agencies that were part of the interagency taskforce on the social cost of carbon, including the Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury.

The U.S. is the second largest emitter of CO₂ today and the largest cumulative emitter of CO₂ since the Industrial Revolution. Our emissions are one of the major reasons atmospheric CO₂ concentrations reached an all-time high of 400 ppm recently. We should be willing to step up and show some global leadership on cutting emissions. What’s more, we have plenty of cost-effective ways of doing that without harming our economic well-being, including by switching to cleaner forms of energy and investing in energy efficiency.

Yes, our children and grandchildren’s futures matter so don’t discount them away!

Warming temperatures can contribute to worsening ozone pollution, which causes respiratory illnesses and breathing problems especially among children and the elderly.

There is a highly academic discussion ongoing on the right discount rate to use in calculating the social cost of carbon. Discount rates are based on the assumption that a dollar in the future is worth less than a dollar today, assuming the global economy and prosperity grow. The SCC report provides estimates discounted at 2.5 percent, 3 percent, and 5 percent.

The choice of discount rate matters greatly because the impacts and costs of our carbon emissions will be borne primarily by future generations. But the concept of discounting makes the most sense when applied to individuals, not across generations.

Unlike conventional pollutants, CO₂ will persist in the atmosphere for 200 years or more. If we use a high discount rate for the SCC calculations, those future costs will be minimized to the point of being ignored. And as a result, the benefits of actions to reduce emissions will also be greatly discounted. The math of compounding discount rates means that, for example with a rate of 7 percent, beyond the next two decades even a fairly significant cost would look small, and by the latter half of the century would approach zero. That is neither sensible from an economic point of view or an ethical point of view. (And for an amusing yet highly informative take on this issue, see David Roberts’ column in Grist.)

In fact, there is a growing consensus among economists that the best approach would be to use a declining discount rate to better reflect inter-generational considerations.

My children will be 25 and 27 in two decades and I’d like to think that their future (and the future of all children, and all future generations, everywhere) matters. They deserve to live in a world without some of the more extreme impacts of climate change. And our generation has the obligation to step up to make sure we’re taking the actions to ensure that, i.e. cutting our carbon emissions.

Instead of attacking the SCC, Congress should put a price on carbon directly

Today’s House hearing is sure to garner a lot of sensationalist headlines. What’s important to keep in mind is that this is ultimately about the costs of climate change which are all too real already. Our growing emissions are also burdening future generations with steep costs. The SCC is simply one important way to factor those costs into our emissions choices today. Congress should also live up to its responsibilities and put a price on carbon through legislation. But somehow I don’t think we’ll be having a House hearing on that any time soon.

About the author: Rachel Cleetus is an expert on the design and economic evaluation of climate and energy policies, as well as the costs of climate change. She holds a Ph.D. in economics.

Economic Policy Institute Says New Air Pollution Rules Will Benefit the Nation

Duane Nichols — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:33:10 +0000

Legislation co-sponsored by Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (WV) and Rep. David McKinley (WV) would delay any EPA action on a cross-state pollution rule and another measure to reduce toxic air emissions from coal-fired power plants. The measure also would create an interagency panel that would study how EPA proposals would impact competitiveness, energy prices and employment. But, the Economic Policy Institute says, “Fears that these rules together will deter economic progress are unjustified.” Further, “The dollar value of the benefits of the major rules finalized or proposed by the EPA so far during the Obama administration exceeds the rules’ costs by an exceptionally wide margin.” Also, “Health benefits in terms of lives saved and illnesses avoided will be enormous.”

EPA has done cost-benefit studies on new environmental rules, and the Economic Policy Institute used those studies to examine the broader impacts of new air pollution measures being considered by the agency. The institute concluded: The combined annual benefits from three major proposed rules examined here exceed their costs by $62 billion to $188 billion a year. The benefit-to-cost ratio ranges from 6-to-1 to 15-to-1. When fully in effect in 2014, the combined costs of the major rules finalized by the EPA would amount to significantly less than 0.1 percent of the economy.

“The regulations finalized and proposed by the EPA are likely to be of tremendous value to the nation, producing a wide range of significant health benefits,” the report said. “Further, the finding that the estimated costs of these regulations amount to only about one-thousandth of the size of the economy, as well as the extended period over which they will take effect, indicate that they would not be a major impediment to economic or job growth in the near-term or in the future.”