EPA Says a Human Life is Worth $900,000 Less

filed in Blog on Jul.11, 2008

So, I didn’t know that the government looked at human life in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, and frankly, I’m a little disturbed by it.

But really, is there a better way to do it? You can’t just pass a law related to the death of every single human being on the planet. So, what the EPA does is, they examine a situation like, say, rampant pollution in New Jersey. If they wanted to end a particular aspect of that pollution, such as Carbon Dioxide in the air or Mercury levels in the water, they would find out how much money it would cost to impose regulations over those activities, and they weigh it against the cost of human life lost if the activity continues.

Morbid as it may be, that means they have to assign a value to each human life. And they just decided that a human life costs $900,000 less than it used to, in a move that most analysts have decided is entirely political. The administration is just trying to give energy companies one last break before they have to clean out their offices, I guess.

Already, the new measurement is going to be put to the test, after a federal court ruled that East Coast pollution levels, which are expected to cause 15,000 premature deaths a year, aren’t allowed to be regulated by the federal government.

We should probably just remember that the government believes 15,000 people’s lives can be excused if Duke Energy can turn an equally valuable profit off of their death. And hey, I’m not a complete bleeding heart — I know that the financial success of a company also helps to improve and even save the lives of their employees or customers.

Or, at least they would… if the version of “government” we have right now didn’t also believe that it’s perfectly natural and reasonable for the CEO of a company to make hundreds of millions annually while gouging prices and laying off employees.