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Futurism

Trump Admin Enabling the Systematic Slaughtering of Thousands of Wild Horses Hospitals Are Getting So Hot That Surgeries Are Getting Canceled and Staff Are Fainting It's Getting So Hot That Nuclear Plants Are Being Forced to Power Down AI's Impact on the Environment Is Absolutely Horrifying, New Paper Finds Giant Oil Tanker Runs Aground in Marine Nature Preserve, Spills Nonstop for Weeks It's Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been Amazon's New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States Droughts Are Getting So Intense That Ancient Ruins Are Beginning to Surface Scientists Genetically Engineer High-Protein Lettuce Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World's Most Endangered Species AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands Man Sues Bank for Being Stupid Enough to Give Him a Mortgage Even When Experts Were Warning Him It Was About to Fall Into the Ocean It's So Hot in Japan That Zoo Animals Are Dropping Dead Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds SpaceX Vows to Keep Poisoning Nearby Towns With Its Fume-Belching Data Center For Another Year El Niño Set to Upend the World Economy The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn As Much of the East Coast Is Choking on Wildfire Smoke, Texas Is Drowning in Life-Threatening Floods Trump Decimated a Satellite Program That Would've Vastly Improved Wildfire Smoke Monitoring Terrifying Video Shows Locomotive Engulfed in Wildfire Flames A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible You'll Never Guess Which Country Is Causing the Most Global Warming Freak Tornado Sucks Man Out of 12-Floor Apartment Microsoft's $7.3 Billion AI Data Center Just Caught a Nasty Lawsuit From Furious Neighbors You'll Never Guess Why Government Officials Are Sinking a Four-Story Riverboat Casino Into the Abyss Something Weird Is Going on With the 66 Billion Trees China Planted in a Huge Wall
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

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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