Daily Caller News Foundation

Report: Obama’s ‘social cost of carbon’ estimates are ‘worthless,’ ‘extremely dangerous’

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
Font Size:

The Obama administration is quietly moving forward with a regulation at the heart of the president’s global warming plan, based on estimates experts dispute.

Friday is the deadline for comments on the Obama administration’s “social cost of carbon” (SCC) estimate. The administration raised the cost of emitting one ton of carbon dioxide to $37 last year, which will have to be used by federal agencies when crafting new regulations.

Raising the SCC from $21 per ton to $37 per ton would inflate the monetary benefits of regulations that would reduce carbon emissions, which would make it look like President Obama’s plan to cut 80 percent of U.S. emissions by 2050, for example, would yield more monetary benefits than they otherwise would.

But the SCC is based on flawed assumptions. For one thing, even the Working Group that developed the SCC acknowledged: “There is currently a limited amount of research linking climate impacts to economic damages, which makes this exercise even more difficult.”

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity points out that the SCC also inflates the benefits of lowering emissions by using a global analysis, which contradicts regulatory guidelines.

“This creates a mismatch in benefit-cost analyses that overstates the benefits of a regulation by comparing the costs imposed on the U.S. economy to benefits that are assumed to occur everywhere in the world,” ACCCE states in its comments to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

“In this apples-to-oranges comparison, U.S. consumers would be paying the full cost of future worldwide benefits,” ACCCE adds.

But a bigger flaw in the SCC estimate still exists, according to attorney Francis Menton. The SCC hinges on a global warming metric known as “climate sensitivity” — that is, how much global temperatures would rise from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

The SCC estimate was derived using three different economic modelling programs which translate atmospheric concentrations into temperature rises based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate sensitivity finding. Those temperature rises on then converted into economic damages.

The latest update to the SCC from November 2013 was based on IPCC data from the IPCC’s climate report from October of last year. The most recent IPCC global warming report, however, could not give a central climate sensitivity estimate.

“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies,” the IPCC noted in its report from last year.

“First, it means that IPCC is clear that it has not been able to develop a credible subjective probability density function for the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter,” Menton wrote in his OMB comments.

“Second, it means that the IPCC admits that it does not have a credible mean, mode or median value of the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter,” Menton added. “In the mathematics of Decision Theory, this situation is called Complete Ignorance Uncertainty.”

While the IPCC said they were 95 percent confident global warming was driven by human greenhouse gas emissions, they have not given a central estimate for climate sensitivity and were also less certain about the lower-bound climate sensitivity estimate.

“Clearly, America’s initial conditions in terms of its fossil fuel resources, its economic growth prospects, its debt levels, and so forth, matter, if the government is going to arbitrarily increase U.S. energy prices via such carbon taxes,” Menton said.

Environmentalists have supported the increased SCC. Even former vice president Al Gore has weighed in on the SCC and has helped environmentalists deliver more than 120,000 comments to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in support of putting a high cost on carbon emissions.

“Right now, carbon polluters are using our atmosphere as an open sewer, and it’s costing all of us– in disaster clean-up, altered growing seasons and public health impacts,” said Gore, whose personal investments would likely benefit from a high cost of carbon estimate.

“The carbon calculus needs to accurately reflect the high cost we’re all paying for the damage done to our planet,” the failed presidential candidate added. “The Social Cost of Carbon is a vital step in doing just that.”

But pushing the SCC estimate would inflate the benefits of radical environmental policies, while masking the true costs of such rules. It would also give more credibility to those pushing for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Having an official government estimate of the monetary damages of carbon would provide a jumping of point for lawmakers to peg the price of carbon at.

“In short, for many reasons, the current SCC estimates are not only worthless; they are extremely dangerous to put forward by this task force as credible input to U.S. energy, economic and national security-related policy analyses,” Menton said.

Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel