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80, 87 (1943). When it deemed regulation of power plants appropriate, EPA said that cost was irrelevant to that determination—not that cost-benefit analysis would be deferred until later. Much less did it say (what the dissent now concludes) that the consideration of cost at subsequent stages will ensure that the costs are not disproportionate to the benefits. What it said is that cost is irrelevant to the decision to regulate.

That is enough to decide these cases. But for what it is worth, the dissent vastly overstates the influence of cost at later stages of the regulatory process. For example, the dissent claims that the floor standards—which the Act calibrates to reflect emissions limitations already achieved by the best-performing sources in the industry—reflect cost considerations, because the best-performing power plants "must have considered costs in arriving at their emissions outputs." Post, at 10. EPA did not rely on this argument, and it is not obvious that it is correct. Because power plants are regulated under other federal and state laws, the best-performing power plants' emissions limitations might reflect cost-blind regulation rather than costconscious decisions. Similarly, the dissent suggests that EPA may consider cost when dividing sources into categories and subcategories. Post, at 11–12. Yet according to EPA, “it is not appropriate to premise subcategorization on costs.” 77 Fed. Reg. 9395 (emphasis added). That statement presumably explains the dissent’s carefully worded observation that EPA considered “technological, geographic, and other factors” when drawing categories, post, at 13, n. 4, which factors were in turn "related to costs" in some way, post, at 11. Attenuated connections such as these hardly support the assertion that EPA’s regulatory process featured "exhaustive consideration of costs," post, at 2.

All in all, the dissent has at most shown that some elements of the regulatory scheme mitigate cost in limited ways; it has not shown that these elements ensure cost-