Yon the next decade, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aims to replace all lead pipes in the country. Few did more to make the change than Ronnie Levin, who published a cost-benefit analysis in 2023 on reducing lead in drinking water, calculating the dollar costs of problems such as impaired cognitive function and increased risk of health problems such as hypertension and premature birth. against the cost of lead mitigation. The EPA had pegged the annual health benefits of the rule at $645 million and the cost of implementing it at $335 million, a benefit-cost ratio of 2 to 1. But Levin and his collaborator (and husband) Joel Schwartz found that mitigating lead in water in the United States would actually save more than $8 billion a year in health benefits and at least $2 billion more in infrastructure costs, with a benefit-cost ratio of 35 to 1.
Levin, a professor in the department of environmental health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, has spent much of her career advocating for the need to take lead mitigation seriously and said it was “mind-boggling” that the EPA would agree to a target so ambitious. While working for the EPA in the 1980s, she composed another cost-benefit analysis of lead in drinking water, which found that one-fifth of Americans were consuming levels of lead in water that the EPA considered unsafe. The document, which scandalized the country after it was leaked to the press in 1986, was a major factor in a 1991 rule designed to minimize the amount of lead and copper in drinking water.
Levin attributes the speed of change to the Biden Administration’s interest in leading, as well as his own understanding of the EPA. Levin’s analysis strategically relied on EPA’s own data, assumptions, and estimates to make the case for lead mitigation and make it more difficult for the government to question the research. While she is excited about the new rule, Levin says rulemaking isn’t good enough on its own. “Without good implementation and enforcement, as has been the case since 1991, not much will happen.”