EPA clears way for more pollution.

Who pays for the 52,000 deaths a year in the United States caused by small particulates and other air pollution released by coal-fired power plants?

Who pays for the 26 percent increase in chronic bronchitis associated with living near a coal plant? Or the myriad of other health problems caused by toxins released when burning coal?

When Environmental Protection Agency Administration Scott Pruitt talks about how the Clean Power Plan unfairly disadvantaged plants that burn coal, he never talks about who is paying for the human misery this industry causes.

For if the industry had to compensate all the people who suffer and die prematurely from the air pollution produced, coal plants would have gone out of business long ago. And that’s before we begin talking about carbon dioxide, and how these plants contribute to climate change.

RELATED: Natural gas and wind burying coal

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston’s most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

Chris Tomlinson

Anyone with a basic understanding of economics is rolling their eyes when Pruitt claims the Clean Power Plant was distorting energy markets. The EPA’s fundamental mission is to make sure polluters pay the costs that they inflict on others, and that’s all the Clean Power Plan did.

For over a hundred years, owners of coal plants have pumped noxious fumes loaded with tiny particulates into the air we breath. Those fumes and particulates ruin lungs and have caused a 26 percent increase in respiratory problems and associated deaths, according to hundreds of academic studies since 1970.

Reducing air pollution in urban areas was a major contributor to the 18 percent increase in life expectancy since the founding of the EPA, according to a 2013 Department of the Interior study. Further improvements could decrease premature death from bronchitis by 40 percent, according to a United Kingdom study.

Those longer, healthier lives have value not only to those individuals and their families, but also to our economy due to longer working lives and decreased health care costs. Pruitt and others in the Trump administration don’t talk about those economic benefits when they complain that shutting down coal plants may lead to higher electricity prices.

If the Trump administration truly wanted the best, most balanced economic benefit for the American people, it would keep the Clean Power Plan. But because Trump campaigned against it, and promised to boost the job prospects of 63,000 workers in the coal business, Pruitt is going to dirty up the air.

RELATED: Rick Perry wants you to pay more to support coal, nuclear industries

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has also been talking about our energy markets, claiming that tax incentives for wind and solar power distort them. Therefore he has recommended subsidies for nuclear and coal power plants.

Like Pruitt, Perry also fails to understand how markets are supposed to work, or the government’s role in making them as fair as possible.

Most of America’s coal-fired plants were built using taxpayer money back when the government set the rates. All of America’s nuclear power plants were subsidized by the federal government. Just last week Perry provided a loan guarantee to the new Vogtle plant in Georgia.

Government’s role in modern energy markets is to guarantee reliable electricity that accurately reflects the generation and pollution costs at the lowest price. Pruitt and Perry are tipping the scales toward coal plants by failing to capture their entire environmental costs.

If you want the Trump administration to favor coal plants, then that’s what you are getting. Just don’t call it a competitive market when dirty energy is allowed to pollute for free in order to compete with clean energy.

Also know that thousands of people will die from lung diseases every year as a result, and you will bear that cost in slower economic growth and higher health care bills. That’s the very definition of a distorted market.