Annals Of Government Fraud: The "Social Cost Of Carbon"
June 12, 2016/ Francis Menton
Somewhere along the line in the growth of the administrative state, some very naive people got the idea that giving bureaucrats arbitrary power is no problem because the bureaucrats can be constrained by a requirement that they do a "cost-benefit analysis" before they undertake major actions or regulations. Thus no bureaucratic regulation will proceed unless the benefits exceed the costs. Obviously, if the benefits exceed the costs, the regulation would be a net benefit, and of course it should take effect. What could go wrong?
In the ranks of such touchingly naive people we have, for example, the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court. The Congress has indulged in hundreds of broad delegations of regulatory power to the administrative state, often with theoretically constraining language that either explicitly requires a cost-benefit analysis, or alternatively says something sort of close to that, such as that any regulation must be "appropriate and necessary." In the case of a collection of power plant emissions regulations imposed by EPA in 2011, EPA attempted to take the position that the "appropriate and necessary" test under the Clean Air Act did not require it to consider cost before imposing the regulations. The Supreme Court disagreed in the 2015 case of Michigan v. EPA, and sent EPA back to the drawing board. So with that, agencies will almost always be required to assess cost against benefit before imposing any major action or regulation, and thus everything is now back to perfect balance and equilibrium in the world. Right??
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/6/11/annals-of-government-fraud-the-social-cost-of-carbon