Calculating the Cost of Global Warming
ALI Director Richard L. Revesz was featured in The Washington Post article “Scientists have a new way to calculate what global warming costs. Trump’s team isn’t going to like it.”
The article explored the recommendation by the National Academy of Sciences to update the federal metric known as the “social cost of carbon,” which refers to the actual financial cost of emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Director Revesz, who served as a reviewer on the report issued by the National Academy of Science, spoke to the Post about the recommendations. From the article:
“The report endorses the use of declining discount values, where the declining rates respond to uncertainty around a number of factors,” Revesz said. “As for negative impacts that happen far into the future, those models would lead to substantially lower discount rates, and lower discount rates would lead to higher values for the social cost of carbon.”
Revesz added that the current estimate of the social cost of carbon is a global estimate — that is, it applies to the entire world, not just the United States. Some critics have argued for a U.S.-specific estimate in the future, which would be a smaller value than the global estimate.
… Revesz added that the report’s release could place pressure on the Trump administration in a different way, making it more difficult for the administration to make any arbitrary or unscientific changes to the social cost of carbon estimate to lower its value once in office.
“If the metric is revised, then the incoming administration would have an obligation to explain why it’s departing from the current approach,” Revesz said. Any changes made without adequate scientific justification would likely be struck down in court. And given that the new academy report is likely to be recognized as the “gold standard for scientific evaluation of the social cost of carbon,” he said, it would be difficult to justify any changes that dramatically depart from its recommendations.
Still, despite the transition team’s criticism of the current metric, how the new administration will choose to approach it once in office remains to be seen.
“This report is a blueprint of actions that should be taken in the near term and actions that should be taken in the longer term,” Revesz said, adding that the most responsible action would be to “follow the prescription of the report.”
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