The Social Cost of Carbon, Greenhouse Gas Policies, and Politicized Benefit/Cost Analysis

Benefit/cost analysis can be a powerful tool for examination of proposed (or alternative) public policies, but, unsurprisingly, decisionmakers’ policy preferences can drive the analysis, rather than the reverse. That is the reality with respect to the Obama Administration computation of the social cost of carbon, a crucial parameter underlying the quantitative analysis of its proposed climate policies, now being reversed in substantial part by the Trump Administration. The Obama analysis of the social cost of carbon suffered from four central problems: the use of global benefits in the benefit/cost calculation, the failure to apply a 7% discount rate as required by Office of Management and Budget guidelines, the conflation of climate and GDP effects of climate policies, and the inclusion of non-climate effects of climate policies as co-benefits, as a tool with which to overcome the trivial temperature and other climate impacts of those policies. Moreover, the Obama analysis included in its “market failure” analysis the fuel price parameter that market forces are likely to incorporate fully. This Article suggests that policymakers and other interested parties would be wise to concentrate on the analytic minutia underlying policy proposals because policy analysis cannot be separated from politics

Regulating Access to Developmental Drugs for Terminally Ill Patients: Abigail Alliance v FDA

This amicus brief was filed in support of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs in their lawsuit to force the Food and Drug Administration to provide patient access to drugs for cancer and other life-threatening illnesses after those drugs have passed through phase 1 clinical testing and have received FDA approval to enter additional clinical trials as a basis for eventual FDA approval for marketing. We make three arguments: (1) FDA staff face strong incentives to be too cautious in approving new drugs. As demonstrated by experience in cancer drug testing, patients often face a situation in which high-quality data from phase 1 clinical trials strongly indicate that a drug's benefits probably exceed its risks. (2) Permitting terminally-ill patients to access potentially life-saving post-phase-1 drugs still in testing will not unduly discourage patient participation in additional trials or inhibit post-phase- randomized clinical trials needed to obtain FDA approval. This is evident from the widespread and growing phenomenon of post-approval randomized clinical trials of approved drugs. (3) For similar reasons, it is clear that permitting terminally-ill patients to access potentially life-saving post-phase-1 drugs in testing will not discourage manufacturers from conducting additional randomized clinical trials.Health and Safety, Other Topics