On December 9, 2020, EPA issued a new rule deceptively titled, Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Benefits and Costs in the Clean Air Act Rulemaking Process. The rule has been widely and justly criticized for requiring EPA to publish numerical estimates of regulatory benefits...

Many of the objections raised against the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to evaluate government regulation, especially in the environmental context, center around the difficulties involved in quantifying and monetizing regulatory benefits. These difficulties implicate deep theoretical issues...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is one of three criteria by which the goals of environmental regulation can be set. (The other two are feasibility and health-based standards.) The term refers to any decision-making technique that weighs and compares the costs and the benefits of a course of action,...

This article looks at the ongoing debate over the use of cost-benefit analysis in agency rulemaking through a case study of a set of EPA power plant regulations that brought that debate before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009. In the briefing before the Court, a peculiar pattern emerged: the...

Designing climate change regulation presents a dilemma. Because 32 to 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions result from individual choices, climate change regulation must shift the significant financial incentives that both corporations and individuals now face to use carbon-based energy...

This essay attempts to construct a normative justification for the imposition of human rights duties on transnational corporations (TNCs) that commit environmental wrongs in the developing world. Under the now near-hegemonic worldview of welfare economics, TNCs are analogised to individuals...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is usually treated as a monolith. In fact, the term can refer to a broad variety of decision making practices, ranging from a qualitative comparison of pros and cons to a highly formalized and technical method grounded in economic theory that monetizes both costs and...

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is destined to take its place as one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, or for that matter, of the entire planet. Like so many other disasters on that list, it was entirely preventable. BP must shoulder its share of...