Study: Carbon emission cost vastly underestimated in US
Each ton of carbon dioxide that exits a smokestack or tailpipe is doing far more damage than what governments take into account, researchers conclude in a scientific paper published Thursday.
But what is the actual cost in dollar terms of the carbon emissions driving climactic change?
That’s what researchers from a variety of fields — science, economics, medicine — are trying to figure out through a metric called the social cost of carbon, a price that represents the total climate damage caused to society through carbon emissions. It’s been used in the past to justify tougher limits on carbon emissions and more spending on climate solutions, like transitioning to renewable energy and natural flood protection.
Currently, the United States government uses a price of $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, but the researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the price should be $185 per ton — 3.6 times higher than the current U.S. standard.
“Our results suggest that we are vastly underestimating the harm from each additional ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Kevin Rennert, a study author and director of the federal climate policy initiative at Resources for the Future, an environmental nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.
Rennert and colleagues created an updated model to measure the societal cost of emitting carbon that includes several measures excluded in previous research. They say key additions include a better accounting of the uncertainty of future climate policy, economic growth and environmental phenomena like sea-level rise. They also include damages to ecosystems, biodiversity and human health, which previously weren’t accounted for.
The changes come in response to a 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that said current carbon pricing calculations were inadequate and gave several recommendations for bringing the outdated models up to speed.
Researchers began calculating damage from carbon emissions in the 1980s and before 2017, the last updates to the modeling were in the early to mid-1990s, said Max Auffhammer, an author of the 2017 report and professor of international sustainable development at the University of California, Berkeley.
“A lot of science has happened,” he said. “A lot of amazing datasets have come online for us to study how environmental change translates into outcomes we care about.”
In the U.S., federal officials began applying the cost estimate to new regulations more than a decade ago after environmentalists successfully sued the government for not taking greenhouse gas emissions into account when setting vehicle mileage standards.
The $51-per-ton estimate under Biden restored a figure used during the Obama administration. The Trump administration had reduced the figure to about $7 or less per ton. The lowered estimate counted only damage felt in the U.S.