9 - Economics

Summary

President Reagan’s 1981 executive order exalted the use of formal cost–benefit analysis in determining whether to promulgate regulations (to the extent environmental laws permit those considerations). Regulations to curb pollution from oil and gas operations and the combustion of oil and gas, as documented in various studies, yield larger benefits than costs. To tilt cost–benefit analysis to disfavor these regulations, the administration adopted methods that systematically understated the economic benefits from regulations. It ignored public health and environmental benefits from reducing emissions, despite documentation by scientific studies, and ignored benefits that are difficult to capture in monetary terms. It also adopted assumptions that gave only limited consideration to the well-being of future generations and of non-Americans, both controversial ethical choices. The administration, forced by existing court decisions to take into account climate impacts, chose an extremely paltry sum of $1 per ton of carbon dioxide (down from $51, as calculated by the Interagency Working Group during the Obama administration). Armed with skewed economic analysis, the administration weakened numerous regulations governing the operations of the oil and gas sector, including curbing emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.