Between the 1980s and today, cost-benefit analysis became one good-government reform that actually took hold across the public sector. So much so that President Obama’s own regulatory guru, Cass Sunstein, would write an article proclaiming that when it comes to regulation, Democrats and Republicans have “embraced the need for careful analysis of costs and benefits.” Yet in the great American way of indulging opposites, the same period also marked the rise of climate policy, which has, of necessity, been a negation of cost-benefit analysis.
There...