KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JOHN TIERNEY write how E.P.A. Drops Age-Based Cost Studies

Instead of the traditional assumption that all lives saved from cleaner air are worth the same, administration officials in two environmental studies included an alternative method that used two values, $3.7 million for the life a person younger than 70 and $2.3 million for an older person, a 37 percent difference.

Too bad; it makes perfect sense to me. John D. Graham, founder of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and the regulations administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, has been the champion of this "life-expectancy analysis" and "has been urging rigorous cost-benefit analyses for all federal agencies"; he's identified here as "a b�te noire of environmentalists".

The life-expectancy analysis, intended to identify policies that would add the most years to people's lives, also accompanied two cost-benefit analyses at the E.P.A., as well as at other agencies in the Clinton administration....Environmentalists say the problem with Dr. Graham's approach is that it inflates the costs of regulations and diminishes the perceived benefits....

Wow! In other words, they reject it because it shows how much policies cost!

Milton C. Weinstein, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a pioneer of life-expectancy analysis, said it had become routine among medical researchers but still aroused controversy.

"There's an equity argument that every citizen should be entitled to an equal claim on resources and shouldn't be penalized for the fact that they've lived a larger portion of their life span," Professor Weinstein said. "But you can never save a life. You can only prolong it. When you give medical treatment or make the environment safer, the relevant question is how much of a life you can save. Most people, if given the choice between applying resources to save a 10-year-old or a 70-year-old, would choose the 10-year-old."

Seems pretty balanced, coming from the much-maligned New York Times. Interestingly, it's one of their most e-mailed stories. Recently NPR pretty much took the side of the environmentalists withEPA Criticized for Plan to Reduce Value of Seniors' Lives.