Legal headaches await efforts to ax social cost of carbon
E&E News; February 13, 2017
Gutting a controversial method that federal agencies use to weigh climate change damages could come at a high legal price, analysts say.
Under the Obama administration, agencies used a metric, known as the social cost of carbon, to estimate the hidden costs of carbon dioxide emissions. That is, they assigned a dollar value to asthma attacks exacerbated by poor air quality or damage wrought by rising seas.
This system — part of the cost-benefit analysis the Obama administration used to determine whether it made financial sense for regulations to move forward — is widely expected to fall out of favor in the Trump era. The president and his leadership, after all, have expressed basic doubts about the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans cause climate change. Far from controlling emissions, they have vowed to roll back existing regulations.
