An increasingly common approach to climate rules by those looking to stop them is to draw up a cost-benefit model or rely on cost-benefit analysis, point at the numbers, and declare that they just don’t add up. Robert Stavins, who knows from cost-benefit analysis, offers a useful corrective which closes:

Although formal benefit-cost analysis should not be viewed as either necessary or sufficient for designing sensible public policy, it can provide an exceptionally useful framework for consistently organizing disparate information, and in this way, it can greatly improve the process and hence the outcome of policy analysis.

In other words, public policy made with cost-benefit analysis will tend to be better than policy made without it, but but policy made using cost-benefit analysis and considering effects other than just aggregate costs and benefits will be better than policy made using cost-benefit analysis alone.