For those of us of a certain age, the goodness of cutting regulations is self-evident. As former President Ronald Reagan said, we should leave it to individuals to make choices about the world they live in.

Forty years of experience, on the other hand, has shown us that government regulations make our world a lot better. Take air quality, for example. Anyone who has been to China in the last 10 years knows what bad air quality looks like. It looks a lot like Los Angeles in the 1950s.

Over the years since then, air quality in the U.S. has improved dramatically. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, from 1970 to 2017, aggregate national emissions of the six most important pollutants dropped an average of 73 percent.

Why has U.S. air quality improved so dramatically? It’s regulations such as the Clear Air Act that are primarily responsible. Such regulation isn’t free — it has imposed about $65 billion in costs on corporations since 1990 as it forced them to clean up emissions, but it also led to $2 trillion in benefits for you and me.

The benefits come from the fact that air pollution is an insidious health risk: every year, it kills tens of thousands of Americans and causes untold numbers of hospital visits, lost working time, lost school days, etc. The cost of this is staggering, which is why the Clear Air Act has produced such huge benefits.

But the costs of the Clean Air Act are not distributed equally.

The costs fall mostly on polluters, and this hits their bottom lines and their stock prices. The benefits are distributed widely across society because we all get to live in a cleaner, healthier world.

Because polluters don’t capture the benefits of the Clean Air Act, they don’t like it. They would much rather save $65 billion.

So they complain endlessly about “overreaching” and “burdensome” regulations that cost billions of dollars. They conveniently avoid talking about the trillions of dollars of benefits that society captures.

Then, when politicians get rid of these regulations, polluters pollute. You might be unsurprised to learn that in the years since President Donald Trump took office, we can see our air quality declining.

Right now, something even bigger is brewing. Rather than go after individual regulations, the EPA is considering a rule that could impact the foundation of some of the most effective regulations. The new rule would require scientific studies used in rulemaking to disclose all of their raw data before the science can be considered when making regulations.

This may not sound bad, but it is. Because the raw data in many studies includes confidential medical records, which cannot be released, this rule will let the EPA ignore the overwhelming consensus of scientific evidence that air pollution is harmful when deciding how to regulate pollution.

Make no mistake — this is not about transparency or improving the economy. This is crony capitalism at its worst. Polluters make huge campaign contributions, and the politicians they elect then roll back regulations that are protecting our air quality, allowing these same polluters to make more money.

The cost to Americans, who will be sickened and even killed, will be staggering, and the overall economy will suffer significant damage — far in excess of the cost savings that polluters get.

We need to rethink our antipathy towards regulations. In many cases, they make the world and our economy better. And we should insist that our elected representatives consider what’s in the best interest of all Americans, and not what’s in the best interest of polluting corporations. They should reject putting handcuffs on science.

Andrew E. Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University who studies the science and politics of climate change.