‘Premature death,’ unexplained, skews policy discussion

Deliberation of environmental policy would profit from an end to banter about “premature death.”

The phrase effused often from the administration of Barack Obama, whose Environmental Protection Agency employed it liberally in press releases heralding egregious regulation.

Apparently, it survives the Trump administration’s campaign to restore constitutional order there.

“Cost of E.P.A.’s Pollution Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year,” says the headline atop an Aug. 22 article in the New York Times.

The reporter found the number in EPA documents assessing the administration’s proposed substitute for the stalled Clean Power Plan. A measure appearing in such assessments is “premature deaths.”

What, then, are premature deaths? How are they counted?

Government agencies and private health organizations estimate premature mortality for many reasons. EPA uses it as a risk factor to estimate the “value of a statistical life” in cost-benefit calculations.

For that purpose, a death is premature if it is thought likely to occur before some baseline, often 75 years, about the average age of mortality in the US.

The metric thus represents a highly interpretive statistical construct, essential to risk analysis but unhelpful by itself for evaluation of policy.

Statistically—absent explanation seldom forthcoming from eager bureaucrats or reporters leaping to judgment—those purported deaths in the New York Times headline might represent the expirations of 1,400 74-year-olds an hour each before their birthdays. Would that be compelling for policy-making?

In fact, against broader assessments of premature death, covering causes such as drug abuse and infant mortality, 1,400/year in the whole US population is a very low rate.

The naturally sympathetic, of course, will ask, “But what about those 1,400 victims and their grieving relatives and friends?”

But that’s the point: Factors in the analysis of a single risk, among the myriad risks confronting humanity, are not identifiable people dying of specific policy change.

A ready antidote exists for premature death—at least of the type flaunted, without definition or context, to influence thinking about policy: unshakable skepticism.

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Aug. 24, 2018; to comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity)