EPA says incidental benefits of pollution rules don?t count

A few lawsuits added further complications over the course of this history, but a key one was decided by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Obama administration had erred by not performing an economic analysis before formulating emissions rules.The Obama-era EPA went back and redid the rulemaking process, and the result was one of the more costly set of rules in US history. Instead, the process of removing mercury from exhaust streams would also eliminate a lot of particulate emissions, and their absence drove many of the health benefits.The rules were put in place during the Obama administration, which was promptly sued. This is substantially more than the cost of the pollution controls.While Clean Air Act regulations do not require that the financial benefits outweigh the costs, having the cost-benefit analysis indicate that they do generally leaves a rule less vulnerable to lawsuits.The new EPA decision, however, indicates that it has determined that regulatory decisions should not consider co-benefits—at all, for this or any future rules.