Environmental Rules: Job Killers or Job Creators?

Environmental Rules: Job Killers or Job Creators?

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The Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews all proposed federal regulations, have never used job figures as part of the calculus of the costs and benefits of rule-making, largely because there is no accepted methodology for assessing them. But the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law said in a new report that despite the limitations of current methods of measuring job gains and losses, they should be considered when drawing up future environmental rules.

Michael A. Livermore, the institute’s director and the principal author of the study, noted that the the oratory surrounding job impacts has heated up in recent years — for example, in the debates over new Clean Air Act rules and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. His report noted that the term “job-killing regulations” had appeared in a sampling of American newspapers four times in 2007 and 706 times in 2011.