Policymakers need estimates that reflect the real costs of climate change in order to make fair and unbiased policy decisions that will affect our lives and the lives of future generations," Brooks adds. "When we do not fully account for the realities of climate change, we are essentially making decisions half-blind. "The social cost of carbon, for example, is designed to capture the costs of climate damages on families, communities, businesses and more, ensuring they are factored into policy decisions by federal agencies," says Brooks of the Environmental Defense Fund. Supporters of the measure argue it policy makers a way to make decisions by being able to account for the cost of a legislative action on the environment. "Increasing the social cost of carbon from its unjustifiably low levels under the Trump administration will lead to policy choices that lower emissions, ultimately lowering the harm that Americans face from a warming and more variable climate," Carleton says. Carleton co-authored a paper with Greenstone published in January that outlined the steps toward updating the social cost of greenhouse gasses. "This was a strong first step," Tamma Carleton, an assistant economics professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, said of the reinstatement of the social cost of greenhouse gasses. A more comprehensive analysis will be a released in January 2022. This is considered an "interim step" for governmental agencies to use "while we continue the process of bringing the best, most up-to-date science and economics to the estimation of the social costs of greenhouse gases," she says. The Biden administration used the estimates established by the IWG before it was disbanded, Boushey writes. "These dangerously low estimates, which flew in the face of established economic principles, were used to justify the Trump administration's rollbacks of climate and health protections like the federal Clean Car Standards." "The Trump administration disbanded the in 2017 and instead relied on its own 'interim cost' to inform important regulatory decisions that was seven times lower than the IWG's estimate – between $1 to $7 per ton," Brooks says. The president can also have a major influence over the social cost of greenhouse gasses. The social cost of greenhouse gases changes with who is in the White House climate policy and analysis for Environmental Defense Fund, tells CNBC Make It. The costs of methane and nitrous oxide "are much higher because these pollutants cause greater near-term warming and health impacts, thus greater near-term economic damages," Susanne Brooks, senior director of U.S. A metric ton of methane costs $1500, and releasing a metric ton of nitrous oxide costs $18,000, according to the SCC measure. For carbon dioxide, the social cost of releasing a metric ton is $51. There are estimates for the cost of three greenhouse gases: carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide. There is only so much science can attribute to climate change, and so much economics can then translate into dollars."įactors that are considered include changes to agricultural productivity, human health effects, property damage from increased flood risk, natural disasters, disruption of energy systems, risk of conflict, environmental migration and the value of ecosystem services, according to technical support documents released by the Biden administration. "In short, climate damages are typically an underestimate of reality. "There is, of course, a broad range of possible answers, depending on a number of inputs - primarily how large climate damages are, and how to convert them back into today's dollars and cents," Wagner says. The estimates change, depending on which factors are considered important by decision makers. "The metric is a range of estimates, in dollars, of the long-term damage done by one ton of greenhouse gas emissions." The measure "combines climate science and economics to help Federal agencies and the public understand the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," writes Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. "How much does each ton of CO2 emitted today cost us - and, thus, how much should each ton of CO2 cost for all of us to be making the right decisions?" "In many ways, it's the 'holy grail' of climate economics," Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University, tells CNBC Make It in an email. The social cost of greenhouse gasses is a measurement tool established by industry experts to put a dollar figure on the total damages done by emitting one ton of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
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