Has Good Benefit-Cost Analysis Been Swept under the MATS?, with Mary Evans And Matthew Kotchen

Summary: In this week's episode, Kristin Hayes talks with Mary Evans and Matthew Kotchen, two of the authors on a new study published in the journal "Science" last week, which takes a critical look at how the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently updated the benefit-cost analysis of its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS. At the risk of skipping to the punchline, the paper's authors suggest that EPA’s analysis is seriously flawed. Evans and Kotchen discuss why they and their colleagues reached this conclusion, what the perceived flaws in the analysis could mean for human health and the environment, and how EPA and the Trump administration should proceed from here. References and recommendations: "Deep flaws in a mercury regulatory analysis" by Joseph Aldy, Matthew Kotchen, Mary Evans, Meredith Fowlie, Arik Levinson, and Karen Palmer; https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/08/science.aba7932 "Lead pollution tracks the rise and fall of medieval kings" by Ann Gibbons; https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6486/19 DJ D-Nice spinning on Instagram Live with Club Quarantine; https://www.instagram.com/dnice