Social choice, uncertainty about external costs and trade-off between intergenerational environmental impacts: The emblematic case of gas-based energy supply decentralization

In fact, this result has an interesting policy implication. It suggests unless questioning the current enthusiasm on natural gas-fired CHP distributed generation deployment (e.g. the European Commission is indeed advocating DG as a contribution to GHG emission reduction) and helps us to reflect upon gas-fired DG supporting environmental policies which focus on the reduction of GHG emissions and totally disregard the possible trade-off between the impacts of global and local-regional pollutants. Unless one denies the rationality attributed to making tradeoffs, on the basis of ethical limits of economic valuations. Even in this case, however, cost-benefit analysis seems to be legitimate and a necessary step of the public discourse. We think that the results of this paper are emblematic, from this point of view.