Revisions to the European Treaty of Union require some form of environmental appraisal – primarily risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis – of regulatory initiatives by the European Commission. A retrospective look at the emergence of environmental appraisal also shows that, while the...

New physical constraints emerged in the 20th century and are changing the decision criteria used until now. Two optimisation problems are equivalent: (1) maximising discounted utility with a long-run survival constraint and (2) maximising a new type of utility that treats the present and future...