Institute for Policy Integrity

icn

Leading environmental organizations are pressing the White House not to bow to industry pressure to abandon the government's main method for measuring the future costs of global warming pollution and the benefits of new pollution controls.

At issue is an economic calculation known as the "social cost of carbon," or SCC, which estimates the cost in dollars that society will ultimately pay for the harm caused by each ton of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.

That price tag helps policymakers decide how much economic sense it makes to impose costly emissions controls.

Oil, gas and other industry groups recently petitioned the White House Office of Management and Budget to prohibit the use of the cost-benefit tool, arguing that it was imprecise and needed additional peer review.

In a filing on Wednesday, the method's defenders countered that while the estimates could be improved over time, they are "an important, if conservative estimate of the costs of climate change and the benefits of reducing carbon pollution."

The SCC estimate has been used in more than 40 regulatory actions, ranging from efficiency standards for appliances to proposed emissions standards for coal-fired power plants.

Similar approaches are used by other governments and international institutions. The cost calculations are based on widely used peer-reviewed climate and economic models.

"Without an SCC estimate, regulators would by default be using a value of zero for the benefits of reducing carbon pollution, implying that carbon pollution has no costs," a joint submission by experts from four organizations said. "That, sadly, is not the case, as evidenced by the large body of research outlining the sobering health, environmental, and economic impacts of rising temperatures, extreme weather, intensifying smog, and other climate impacts."

The document was sent to OMB by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

A central estimate used by the Obama administration is that a ton of carbon dioxide carries a price tag to society of about $37. That means it would be worthwhile to spend $37 a ton today to control carbon pollution in order to prevent the damages the emissions would cause in the future.