How this scenario is built. The comparison throughout is a world where the rule stays in force versus one where it is repealed — the rule is final but not yet published in the Federal Register, so every figure describes a hypothetical outcome.
Repealing the CO2 standard → coal-fired power plants run more hours than they would have under the rule → those extra run-hours emit additional SO2 and NOx → SO2 and NOx convert to secondary sulfate and nitrate PM2.5 downwind → modelled excess deaths (GEMM concentration-response), reported as steady-state annual counts. Health is modelled entirely through criteria pollutants — the regulated pollutants that go on to form fine particles. CO2 itself is not one of the five species in the source-receptor matrix and carries no modelled health effect here.
The emissions change is bounded by two independently sourced anchors, not a single point estimate with error bars. The gap between them is the actual uncertainty in how big a repeal's emissions effect would be — collapsing it to one number would hide that. The third card is the midpoint the scenario toggle exposes: an interpolation shown for the toggle's middle position, and the only one of the three that is not evidenced.
Acceptance tests — what was checked. Before this prototype's numbers were trusted, … checks were run against the pipeline. The pipeline's arithmetic checks pass on the real Bay-Area source-receptor data, and the Ohio-Valley run has since been performed on the real v02 matrix (four independent data checks, all passing — see the Impact page). What remains unstaged is the full CONUS coal-fleet run. A passing check shows the arithmetic is sound — it says nothing about whether the repeal happens.
| Test | What it checks | Result |
|---|
Core parameters — the constants behind every figure.
Which numbers bind live, and which are authored. The evidence-anchor figures, value of a statistical life, Climate TRACE release and coal-fleet denominators bind live from policy_payload.json; the concentration-response function, baseline death rate, meteorology and acceptance-test results are authored constants, each traced in the provenance drawer.
Honesty ledger — which way each assumption pushes.
| Assumption | Effect on the estimate |
|---|
▲ pushes the estimate up ▼ pushes it down ◆ a
scope or process choice, with no directional effect
“Cluster” = the group of Ohio-Valley coal plants this scenario
models; “cell” = one grid square of the transport model.
Short caveats shown beside each figure.
How every figure here is worded. Figures are modelled estimates under a rule-in-force-versus-repeal comparison, and they are written that way: "would be associated with," "would affect," "we estimate." Each one describes what the model says would change if the repeal took effect and the change were sustained.