Executive Order Deletes Social Cost Of Carbon From Official US Policy Considerations – CleanTechnica

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The social cost of carbon establishes a price for each ton of carbon emitted based on the long term damage it is expected to cause in the future. It has become the government’s primary tool to weigh the economic costs of climate change — such as disaster cleanup or health impacts from warming — against the burden of regulations. In other words, it is a vital component of planning for the future and creating rational regulations that lead to effective governance. But the Heritage Foundation hates government regulations in all forms. It was responsible for crafting the Project 2025 playbook, which the Lord of Mar-A-Loco said he never heard of and knew nothing about while campaigning for president. Nevertheless, he has now appointed Russell Vought, the author of that document, to be the head of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. That appointment suggests he lied through his teeth during the 2024 presidential campaign, not that voters seem to care. In fact, most of them appear to be delighted to be abused so disgracefully.

An executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy” signed on the first day of the new administration disbanded the working group composed of the treasury secretary, energy secretary, and director of national economic policy that set the social cost of carbon and advised how it should be implemented. It revoked that group’s previous decisions and directed the Environmental Protection Agency, which calculates the figure and bases regulatory proposals on it, to reconsider using the social cost of carbon altogether with the goal of eradicating “abuse” that stands in the way of affordable energy production. That executive order show the current occupant of the Offal Office is nothing but a puppet installed by the fossil fuel industry to give them everything they ever hoped for. The millions of dollars they spent to get the Orange Ogre elected will result in a return on investment of 1000 percent or more, but voters appear to enjoy being given a soap suds enema by their Dear Leader.

Discarding The Social Cost Of Carbon

ProPublica reported this week that getting rid of the social cost of carbon will upend energy and environmental regulations meant to address climate change and could have the long term effect of shifting costs from polluting industries directly onto the shoulders of Americans as the expenses of climate change rise. Economists warn that it could be the steep financial price of adapting to this rapid shift, as much as environmental change itself, that will prove the most challenging and destabilizing. If carried out, the shift away from using the social cost of carbon measure would not only make it exceedingly difficult to enact new rules slowing climate change and its growing costs in the future, but it would send the signal that the current administration doesn’t believe that climate change carries economic consequences. No wonder people are cheering! They love being saddled with more expenses — because freedom isn’t free, baby! The move shows “that we’re abandoning any idea that climate change is a problem,” said Marshall Burke, a climate economics researcher at Stanford University.

The social cost of carbon concept earned Yale economist William Nordhaus a Nobel Prize, and the approach has been upheld in federal court. It is an integral factor in creating fuel economy standards, setting EnergyStar requirements for appliances, and regulating the amount of pollution allowed to flow from utilities’ smokestacks. Having no social cost of carbon measure in essence asserts that there is no detrimental cost that comes with a warming planet, and that ultimately lowers the burden — or increases profits — for drillers like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell as well as the auto industry, the plastics industry, the chemical industries, and utility companies.

Canceling the measurement of economic impacts from climate change doesn’t make those costs — estimated to be worth nearly $2 trillion for the US economy this decade — go away. Instead, it will likely have the effect of levying them directly onto citizens, who will see their expenses for everything from housing to food rise higher and faster than they otherwise would. A report published last month by First Street, a commercial research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that climate-driven disasters have already spurred rate hikes in homeowners insurance. Over the next 30 years, the report projects, they may double or even quadruple in Florida and other parts of the country especially at risk for disasters, making insurance one of the most expensive aspects of owning a home. [Note: insurance costs in Florida have already more than doubled in the past four years, exploding the notion that Florida is an inexpensive place for people to retire.]

Meanwhile, many people are paying more for electricity to run air conditioning to cope with extreme heat. The Rhodium Group, a climate and economic research firm, projects that demand for power could increase as much as 9% on average nationwide within the next 15 years due to warming alone, and that by later this century people will be paying as much as 20 percent more for electricity than they would if the climate was not warming, especially in parts of Texas and the South. Extreme heat and humidity are also making it more difficult to work, cutting into both household incomes and company profits as temperatures limit both the number of hours people can labor outdoors and the efficiency of the work they do. An economic study published in the journal Science projects a decline in labor supply as rising temperatures impact worker productivity across parts of the southern United States.

Higher Temperatures, Lower Productivity

Higher temperatures have already cut into the productivity of farming in the US according to a 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change, and crop yields are widely forecast to decrease as temperatures get hotter, which will reduce farm incomes. Local taxes across the country are expected to rise as municipalities raise money for infrastructure projects from water treatment plants to bridges that the climate crisis is making necessary. Collectively, these costs are creating a significant, systemic drag on the US economy. In some of the Gulf Coast counties most vulnerable to hurricanes, that drag could amount to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the growth of gross domestic product and create a permanent stagnation of the local economy. Nationally, researchers estimate climate change is already costing the equivalent of about 1.2 percent of GDP  in the US for each degree of warming. That equals about $200 billion each year today and is on pace to rise to more than $1 trillion annually within the next several decades.

These costs touch people already worried about inflation and home affordability and they stem directly from generations of carbon pollution from fossil fuel consumption that has powered industrial advancement and the growth of the United States’ modern economy. There have been countless and immense benefits to this industrialization, but until the social cost of carbon calculation concept was created, those costs had been difficult to quantify and were shifted onto society at large instead of the balance sheets of the oil and coal companies primarily responsible for them. By eliminating the consideration of carbon’s costs, the current administration will allow carbon emissions to grow unabated, intensifying the increases in global temperature that are driving the broader economic damages.

How High Is Too High?

Climate scientists and economists say it is fair to question whether the $190 per ton arrived at by the Biden administration for the social cost of carbon was too high. It was $42 under the Obama administration and just $7 during the first Trump administration. There are valid reasons to debate some of the assumptions fed into the EPA’s models and the seeming precision that results from them, ProPublica says. But it warns that just because there are a range of calculable outcomes does not make the premise false. Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug, in trying to understand the historic and unprecedented change unfolding on the planet. It is implausible to argue, as the Heritage Foundation does, that there is no social cost of carbon at all. “Calling for a high discount rate is basically saying that we should give virtually no weight to our grandchildren and successive generations,” said Max Sarinsky, the regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank associated with New York University’s School of Law. “It’s saying we should be willing to spend very little now to make life better in the future.”

The position of the Heritage Foundation is that there is a chance there could be an economic benefit to emitting more carbon and that “CO₂ emissions should not be taxed but subsidized.” This is the view of Chris Wright, the new Secretary of Energy. Continuing to burn fossil fuels that drive up the temperature of the environment could lead to higher crop yields in some places, they suggest, which would ultimately outweigh the damages of extreme disasters, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes. In other words, climate change could be a win-win for the environment and for the economy. “Maybe a little bit of lukewarming is good for society,” said Kevin Dayaratna, the Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician and the acting director of its Center for Data Analysis. “You could go on vacation to areas that once you could not necessarily go.”

So go to sleep, people. The fruitcakes and nutjobs who make their living promoting fossil fuels have got us covered — and the people bowed and prayed to the orange god they made. Perhaps now would be a good time to invest in beachfront condos in Antarctica, where Kevin Dayaratna and Chris Wright might be your neighbors. The problem with all these namby pamby climate worrywarts is they just can’t see the big picture, probably because they are not dragging down fat salaries to make this shit up.