The social cost of carbon is not a tax, but a way to estimate the degree of harm posed by carbon emissions. It can help answer questions like: What will it cost to rebuild after a ferocious wildfire or devastating hurricane?
Some consider it the most important number you’ve never heard of. But the social cost of carbon has become something of an obsession among policy wonks and climate nerds alike.
That could be a problem, given that the social cost of carbon, or SCC, undergirds a whole slew of policies that set emissions standards, regulate air pollution and determine the harms imposed by future power plants. “Since basically, every human activity causes some greenhouse gas emissions, the damage a ton of CO2 does is key,” Maximillian Auffhammer, an economist at UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute, wrote recently.
But the basics of the problem, he noted, is that the carbon we emit by driving a car or hopping on a flight will idle in the atmosphere long after we have reached our final destination, causing planetary and health harms that extend far beyond our backyards. Though this kind of accounting was largely dismissed by the Trump administration, which slashed it to $3-$5 per ton, President Biden reinstated a slightly updated SCC of $51 per ton during his first week in office. Biden also asked economists to update the number, taking into account suggestions from the National Academies of Science and Engineering, noted Auffhammer.
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