惯性聚合 高效追踪和阅读你感兴趣的博客、新闻、科技资讯
阅读原文 在惯性聚合中打开

推荐订阅源

J
Java Code Geeks
GbyAI
GbyAI
Google DeepMind News
Google DeepMind News
Jina AI
Jina AI
B
Blog
aimingoo的专栏
aimingoo的专栏
酷 壳 – CoolShell
酷 壳 – CoolShell
T
The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Last Week in AI
Last Week in AI
月光博客
月光博客
H
Help Net Security
V
Visual Studio Blog
量子位
A
About on SuperTechFans
博客园 - Franky
人人都是产品经理
人人都是产品经理
N
Netflix TechBlog - Medium
云风的 BLOG
云风的 BLOG
雷峰网
雷峰网
Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler
Microsoft Security Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
博客园 - 叶小钗
P
Proofpoint News Feed
MongoDB | Blog
MongoDB | Blog

Futurism

Man Creates Tiny Submarine for His Parakeet to Experience Life Underwater The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny Trump Hires Orbital Towing Company to Build Space Interceptors Psychologists Found Something Horrible About the Kind of Men Seeking Trad Wives To Get Swole, Teens Are Pumping Themselves Full of Drugs Meant for Fattening Cows for the Slaughterhouse Foolish Pollsters Are Now Just Asking AI What Voters Would Say in Response to Questions and Publishing It at Face Value OpenAI Says It’s Already Made $100 Million by Stuffing ChatGPT With Ads DOGE Made Drastic Cuts to a Global Vaccine Assistance Program. Now There’s a Deadly Measles Outbreak in Bangladesh Man Punished for Breaking Into Moo Deng’s Zoo Enclosure AI Is Causing Healthcare Costs to Surge There’s a Mass Rebellion Against AI in the Workplace People Who Lose Their Job to AI Are in for a World of Pain, Goldman Sachs Report Finds OpenAI Says Not to Worry About UBI, Because It Has Another Idea Police Officer Helplessly Waves Arms at Waymo That Careened Wrong Way Through Whataburger Drive-Thru Someone Just Threw a Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s House New York Times Makes Substantial Changes to Article That Glazed a Sleazy AI Startup: “Our Piece Should Have Included That Information” Space Scientists Wince as Astronauts’ Lives Depend on Artemis 2’s Controversial Heat Shield During Plunge Back to Earth The Moon Astronauts Have Been Working Out With a NASA Rowing Machine in Space First AI Model From Zuckerberg’s Wildly Expensive Superintelligence Lab Flops Compared to Virtually All Rivals Economists Starting to Admit They May Have Been Wrong About AI Never Replacing Human Jobs AI-Powered Drug Marketer Medvi Responds After Allegations About Fake Doctors and Patients As Astronauts Visit the Moon, NASA Insider Says Agency Is in Shambles Behind the Scenes Man Lights 1.2 Million Square Foot Warehouse on Fire for Not Paying Him Enough NASA Scientists Screamed With Delight When They Saw Something Smashing Into the Moon Google Says Showing Polymarket Bets on Google News Was a Mistake Las Vegas Sphere Turns Into Huge Moon to Celebrate NASA Mission The New York Times Says It’s Identified the Creator of Bitcoin We Talked to a Writer Accused of Publishing An AI-Generated Essay in The New York Times Naked Man Bursts Into Tesla Service Center With a Shotgun Student Dies When Hospital Has No ICU Doctors, Calls One on Videochat Who Pronounces Him Dead Remotely, Lawsuit Claims
EPA Now Values Human Lives at $0
2026-04-04 · via Futurism

Strips of a US one-dollar bill arranged vertically on an orange grid-patterned background. The dollar bill is tinted green, contrasting with the bright orange surface beneath. The strips are unevenly cut, showing parts of the bill's design, including the number "1," leaves, and some text.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images

Sign up to see the future, today

Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech

What’s the value of a dollar? Much less than it was before Donald Trump took office, but evidently more than that of a human life — at least if you ask the US Environmental Protection Agency, that is.

That rather grim valuation came after the EPA updated its policies on industrial pollution limits. For years, the EPA has baked a figure called the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) into its cost-benefit calculations on things like factory pollution. Think of it as the number that answers the question: how much is keeping someone alive worth, in dollars, weighed against the cost of making a corporation clean up after itself?

As Fortune notes, the previous answer hovered at about $11.7 million per person. The Trump administration’s answer is zero.

Erasing the VSL has direct consequences for the regulatory limits on the two most common air pollutants: ozone and fine particulate matter, which are debris 30 times smaller than a human hair. When lives are assigned a higher dollar value, stricter pollution standards tend to clear the “economic efficiency” sniff test, resulting in cleaner air. But that improved air quality comes at the expense of America’s industrial industries, which have to invest in pricey systems to reduce the amount of these pollutants they spew down to acceptable levels.

When lives are worth nothing, however, that bar effectively disappears, resulting in dramatically weaker regulations on how much garbage corporations can pump into the air. That horrifying decision could reverse every gain made since the Clean Air Act in 1970, which as environmental economist Michael Greenstone told Fortune, improved the average US resident’s life expectancy by 1.4 years.

“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Greenstone said. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”

An administration’s assigned VSL, while not the only measure, is seen as a major factor in where a president falls in the struggle between corporate and environmental interests. Pro-industry administrations have toggled it lower, while those more concerned toward public health have pushed it up. However, no president before Trump has ever zeroed-out it out — a total victory for industrial capitalists who will no longer be burdened by the value of human life.

More on environmental regulation: Clean Energy Industry Launching Campaign of Vengeance