Federal climate regulations have imposed higher costs than benefits, with heavy reliance on co-benefits making them an inefficient policy tool.

Last month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a proposed rule to overturn the 2009 endangerment finding. The finding, which declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health and welfare, provided the legal backbone for the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide from cars, trucks, power plants, manufacturing facilities, and more. 

Much of the discourse following Zeldin’s proposed repeal has been about whether the agency’s actions will pass legal muster. An equally important question is whether the federal government’s regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) over the last decade and a half has been an effective climate policy. Our recent research tells us the answer is no.

A Closer Look at Climate Regulations

In a new technical working paper, we analyzed federal climate regulations in the power, transportation, and industrial sectors. We used the government-produced official estimates of costs and benefits for each regulation to measure its cost-effectiveness to avoid any bias. 

While there is significant variation in the cost-effectiveness of these climate regulations, the broad takeaway is that regulations are suboptimal climate policy. The overall findings can be summarized by saying that even though regulators are careful to ensure benefits exceed costs, the methodologies they employ rely heavily on their future theorized benefits to justify ever-increasing costs to consumers.

This comes as little shock to the few of us who comb through federal climate regulations, but it may be surprising to those who have generally trusted regulators without checking their math. Our research also helps to explain the rising popularity of President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda; people are feeling the costs without seeing the benefits. This is especially true in the context of the $1.8 trillion of regulatory costs approved under the Biden administration.

But, while regulators are........

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