Scientists Have a New Way to Calculate What Global Warming Costs. Trump’s Team Isn’t Going to Like It.

Federal Agency/Executive Branch, Federal Regulation, Opinions, Policy, R & D Focus

January 13, 2017

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by Chelsea Harvey (The Washington Post) How we view the costs of future climate change, and more importantly how we quantify them, may soon be changing. A much-anticipated new report, just released by the National Academy of Sciences, recommends major updates to a federal metric known as the “social cost of carbon” — and its suggestions could help address a growing scientific concern that we’re underestimating the damages global warming will cause.

The social cost of carbon is an Obama-era metric first addressed by a federal working group in 2009. The basic premise is simple: Scientists agree that climate change will have all kinds of impacts on human societies, including natural disasters and effects on human health, productivity and agricultural output, all of which have economic consequences.

The social cost of carbon, then, refers to the monetary cost of emitting a single ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, given that these emissions will further contribute to global warming. The value has been used to aid in cost-benefit analyses for a variety of federal environmental rules. Currently, it’s set at about $36 per ton of carbon dioxide.

But the new NAS report, requested by the federal Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, suggests the methodology used to arrive at this value is in need of updating, both to make it more transparent and more scientifically sound. It makes a number of recommendations for future estimates aimed at helping the process “draw more readily on expertise from the wide range of scientific disciplines relevant to [the social cost of carbon] estimation.”

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The method developed by the original federal working group relies on a set of three models which translate current carbon emissions into future temperature increases, factor in the damages that may be caused by the resulting climatic changes in the future and then translate these damages into dollars. The method also applies a discount rate to account for the fact that these damages will occur in the future, rather than right away — the discount rate can be thought of as a kind of interest rate addressing how much the future generation is willing to pay now to avoid climate consequences in the future.

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Despite these concerns from the scientific community, recent documents suggest that the incoming Trump administration may seek to reconsider— or even do away with — the metric. READ MORE Access Report

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