Proponents of greenhouse gas emissions reductions have long assumed that such reductions are the best approach to global climate change control and sometimes argued that they are the least risky approach. It is now generally understood that to be effective such reductions would have to involve...

Many environmentalists and some developed nations appear to have concluded that there is one Many environmentalists and some developed nations appear to have concluded that there is one climate change problem, global warming, and that there is only one solution to it, reducing greenhouse gas...

Last year, researchers Frank Ackerman of Tufts University, Lisa Heinzerling of Georgetown University, and Rachel Massey of the Environmental Research Foundation released a highly controversial study challenging the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as part of government policymaking. The three...

The management of non-native invasive species is a complex but crucial task given the potential for economic and environmental damages. For many invasions the development of socially optimal control strategies requires more than is offered by the single-species, single-control models that have...

Economists have long been interested in measuring distributional impacts of policy interventions. As environmental justice (EJ) emerged as an ethical issue in the 1970s, the academic literature has provided statistical analyses of the incidence and causes of various environmental outcomes as...

Government agencies routinely use the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) in benefit-cost analyses of proposed environmental and safety regulations. Here I review an alternative approach for valuing health risks using a “life-cycle consumption framework.” This framework is based on an...

It has occasionally been asserted that regulators typically overestimate the costs of the regulations they impose. A number of arguments have been proposed for why this might be the case, with the most widely credited one being that regulators fail sufficiently to appreciate the effects of...

As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations increase, the world’s oceans are absorbing CO2 at a faster rate than at any time in the past 800,000 years. While this reduces the amount of the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it also causes changes in seawater chemistry,...