Granite Construction Corporation’s (Granite) recently presented Environmental Impact Report (EIR) referencing their proposed Liberty Quarry project has by definition been funded by an 89-year old member of a gross polluting industry.

Granite has been generating EIR for years. A good deal of their research has been funded by other polluting industries.

In this most recent study, through omission the authors claim that Americans do not put any value on things like having parks to walk in, breathing unpolluted air, drinking safe water, or avoiding getting sick. Of course, the paper doesn’t state it quite like that. What it says is academic-sounding, inside-baseball stuff. It claims that the Environmental Protection Agency got it all wrong in a recent analysis that found true value from less pollution. Why? Because, the authors say, you can’t put a dollar figure on the benefit of less pollution.

This assertion is not only wrong. It is Earth-is-flat fraudulent.

It ignores something what we all know: people value a lot of things that you can’t put a dollar figure on. Something that economics references as “well-being.” In doing this, the paper helps give academic-sounding cover to those who would remove hard-won safeguards which help keep Americans safe and healthy.

By challenging the way the American government calculates benefits to its citizens – i.e. the work of scientists and experts whose duty is to keep Americans’ health and environment safe – the paper is serves economic interests of factories, oil companies and others who don’t like to be held accountable for the pollution they release into our air.

There are many other troubling issues in the paper. It ignores, for instance, the fact that the government’s calculations have been peer-reviewed; not based on ideological hyperbole. It also fails to account for the savings generated when people don’t have to be paid damages after getting sick from pollution. It also leaves out that its authors have long been paid by gross polluting industries.

But it’s the way the paper fits into the broader undermining of American values that’s most troubling.

It is, in fact, just one of many signs of the growing movement against government safeguards. That movement taps into the American spirit of the frontier and a yearning for independence. The movement discounts the fact that a free, functioning society is a society where laws – and yes, government – protect basic privileges which we take for granted. These includes everything from roads that are safe to drive on, lakes that are clean enough to swim in, air that is healthy to breathe, and rivers that do not catch on fire.

A paper like the one put out by National Economic Research Associates not only disregards the value of these government services. It also tries to give a veneer of credibility to those who would undermine so many things Americans cherish. It is time to pull back the curtain and reveal the polluter-funded pseudo-economists for what they really are: anti-regulatory advocates, not independent academics.