In the current US political environment, even environmental regulation is about jobs. As House Republicans continued their attack on the US Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday, they put the spotlight squarely on the jobs that could be lost at various facilities if new air quality regulations on industrial boilers are allowed to move forward. Democrats, meanwhile, argued that cleaning up the environment is a net gain — and can even create more jobs than it destroys.

“This is good business,” said Democratic Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland. She suggested that the United States is a world leader — and maintains a trade surplus — when it comes to manufacturing pollution control equipment.

“Our unemployment rate nationwide is around 9.1 percent,” countered Republican Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, a senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “So if all of these regulations are creating all of these new jobs, where are they?”

There is some truth to both positions. The anti-regulatory crowd tends to ignore the subtle fact that money spent on regulation doesn’t disappear but continues to pass through the economy. At the same time, this does not mean that controlling pollution is the best way to create jobs. After all, money spent on pollution is money that cannot be spent directly on health or other services.

The Republican-controlled House went on to shoot down a series of Democratic amendments on the boiler regulation bill, which is expected to pass as early as Wednesday. The bill would represent just the latest attempt to prevent regulations targeting industrial mercury emissions. And these efforts are just one front in a much larger battle against environmental regulations of pretty much any kind, leading Democrats and environmentalists to claim that Republicans are trying to transport the United States back to the 1800s in terms of federal regulatory authority.

The other dimension of the debate concerns efforts to model health benefits, which are registered along with jobs as part of the cumulative impact of regulations. Last week a House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee held an entire hearing to question some of the basic assertions about health benefits that accrue when the environment — and particularly the air — is cleaned up. Although nobody denies that great gains in air quality have been made, the now-mainstream argument among House Republicans is that we have hit a point of diminishing returns. According to this theory, cleaning up the air further will cost a lot and produce fewer, if any, benefits.

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But while the EPA is targeting increasingly smaller pieces of the pollution pie, it’s also true that many major sources of industrial air pollution — including coal-fired power plants that were grandfathered in under rules that are now decades old — are still quite dirty. George Thurston, an environmental health expert at the New York University School of Medicine, offered up the conventional view: cleaner air equals healthier people equals lower health care costs. And most regulations produce a net gain when these factors are all added up, he says.

“I think we are underestimating the benefits of clean air,” Thurston told the House subcommittee, suggesting that the ratio of benefits to costs is often 16 to one.

Exasperated, Maryland Republican and Chairman Andy Harris suggested that perhaps all lawmakers need to do to resolve the US debt crisis is invest $1 trillion into air regulations and then wait for the $16 trillion in benefits to accrue. “It’s patently ridiculous,” Harris said.

For now, it’s an academic debate. None of the bills passing through the House is likely to make it through the Senate, which is controlled by the Democrats. And although some Democrats have floated anti-regulatory rhetoric in the upper chamber, it’s generally harder to get anything done there. And the White House always has its veto.

In the meantime, the EPA is getting buffeted on both sides in the courts, which is in the end where the most difficult decisions will be decided.