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Joe Wilkins Archives - Futurism

Billionaire Declares That “Tax the Rich” Is Hate Speech That Offends Him Horribly FBI Director Kash Patel Says AI Has Stopped Numerous Violent Attacks Against America. We’d Love to See a Single Whiff of Evidence Video Shows Amazon Drone Dropping Package Into Pond Ordinary People Fear AI, While the Tech Leaders Working to Create a Permanent Underclass Say They’re Extremely Psyched About It Busy Roadways Clogged as Waymo Becomes Stumped by Small Puddle Passengers Groan as Robot Passenger Causes Hour-Long Delay at Oakland Airport Zuckerberg Trying to Simulate Human Biology at the Cellular Level Startup Says It’s Invented a Beanie That Reads Your Mind Man Says His Waymo Ditched Him at the Airport Before He Could Get His Luggage Out of the Trunk, Refused to Return Frontier AI Models Giving Specific, Actionable Instructions to Perpetrate Bioterror Attack The “Pentastack” of Illegal Drugs That Looksmaxxers Like Clavicular Are Taking to Enjoy a Night Out Sounds Like a One-Way Trip to the Hospital Chinese Court Rules That a Worker Cannot Be Replaced by AI There’s Something Bizarre About the Offices of AI Startups Trump’s US Forest Service Spraying Deadly Toxins on America’s Woodlands Wild Video Shows Ukrainian Troops Evacuate Babushka With a Military Robot AV Companies Might be in Trouble Now As Cops Start Ticketing Driverless Cars Elon Musk Just Got Badly Humiliated in Court If You Bet on Polymarket, This New Study May Cause You Physical Pain Mark Zuckerberg Just Got Shot Down by China, Again Startup Says It Can Read Your Brain Signals Using a Pair of Headphones AI Spy Cameras Suddenly Blanketing America Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move Police Are Using AI Camera Networks to Stalk Women Woman Convicted for Attacking Police With Swarm of Furious Bees A Tiny Town Is Building So Many Data Centers That There’ll Be Almost Nothing Else Left The War in Iran Is Causing China to Sell So Many Solar Panels That Your Jaw Will Drop Waymo Has a Bike Lane Problem Ransomware Negotiator Pleads Guilty to Deploying Ransomware Himself America Trembles as Transportation Secretary Announces Plans for Air Traffic Controllers to Lean on AI Tools Experts Warn of AI Swarms Hijacking Democracy With Fake Citizens
EPA Now Values Human Lives at $0
2026-04-04 · via Joe Wilkins Archives - 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

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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