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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

How Should We Calculate the Social Cost of Carbon? Researchers Offer Roadmap in New Analysis

In a newly published analysis, a team of researchers lists a series of measures the administration should consider in recalculating the social cost of carbon--a cost-benefit metric that places a monetary value on the impact of climate change.

The Biden administration is revising the social cost of carbon (SCC), a decade-old cost-benefit metric used to inform climate policy by placing a monetary value on the impact of climate change. In a newly published analysis in the journal Nature, a team of researchers lists a series of measures the administration should consider in recalculating the SCC.

[...] The revised SCC will be created by the federal government's Interagency Working Group (IWG), which includes the Council of Economic Advisors, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

[...] the authors [...] list several recommendations for the IWG to consider in devising the new SCC. Among them are the following:

• Reinstating the estimated economic cost of CO2 emitted to $50 a ton, which the Trump administration lowered to $1-7 a ton
• Updating the damage functions that tally how climate change affects human welfare, from crop losses to heat impacting student learning and worker productivity
• Incorporating the inequitable effects of climate change within and across countries
• Reviewing discount rates—the ways in which the cost of future climate-related damages are priced in today's dollars—in order to better inform today's budgetary processes
• Updating forecasts for both economic and population growth—both of which affect predictions of emissions and related environmental impact

Journal Reference:
Gernot Wagner, David Anthoff, Maureen Cropper, et al. Eight priorities for calculating the social cost of carbon, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-00441-0)

Original Submission