The shadow price, or 'social cost', of carbon is an important indicator of the global incremental damage done by emitting greenhouse gases today. Cost--benefit analysis would set the optimal amount of greenhouse-gas-emission reduction at the point where this social cost just equals the...

The use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in British environmental policy has gone through several stages. Early applications of CBA tended to ignore environmental impacts altogether, leave them for a subsidiary "impact analysis", or provide only a partial monetization of impacts. Currently, CBA is...