EC238 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Unintended Consequences, Cost Estimate, Opportunity Cost
Document Summary
Cost analysis focuses on the costs to a single community or firm of an environmental program, or of a single environmental project like a wastewater treatment plant, or beach restoration project. At a higher level, it concerns with the costs to an entire economy of achieving stated environmental goals. The opportunity cost of using resources in a certain way is the highest-valued alternative use to which those resources might have been put and which society as to forgo when the resources are used in the specified fashion. Social opportunity costs include all costs, no matter to whom they accrue. Some of the potential environmental impacts from these public projects or programs can be mitigated: steps can be taken to reduce or avoid them. Sometimes environmental improvements can be obtained at zero social costs, except the political cost of making the required changes in public laws or regulations, these are known as no-cost improvements.
