You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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There are several notable pieces this week that relate to the social cost of carbon (SCC)—the government’s powerful tool to aid in justifying all manner of rules and regulations. The SCC is supposed to represent the negative externalities (i.e., projected economic damages in a projected society resulting from projected climate change) that are associated with the emissions of each ton of carbon dioxide. It was developed as a way to translate carbon dioxide emission reductions into dollars savings and to make the “benefits” of proposed climate actions hit closer to home for more people.
But as you may guess from the number of “projected”s in the above parenthetical, the SCC is so highly malleable that you can pretty much game it to produce any value desired—the perfect characteristic for an all‐purpose economic cost/benefit tool wielded by an opportunistic and activist government.
The situation is well‐described by American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher in his recent post for The Hill “The magic of the EPA’s benefit/cost analysis.”
Welcome to the fascinating world of EPA benefit/cost analysis… the administration conducted an “analysis” of the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), in order to generate an estimate of the marginal externality cost of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The problems with that analysis are legion, but the central ones are the use of global (rather than national) benefits to drive the benefit/cost comparison; the failure to apply a 7 percent discount rate to the streams of benefits and costs, despite clear direction from the Office of Management and Budget; and — most important — the use of ozone and particulate reductions as “co‐benefits” of climate policies. The administration’s estimate is about $36 per ton in 2015 ($31 per ton in 2010).
And that is how a regulation yielding future changes in temperatures and sea levels approaching zero can be claimed to yield net benefits “exceeding $100 billion, making this a highly beneficial rule.” In the EPA’s benefit/cost framework, the actual effects of the policies literally are irrelevant; just compute the assumed reduction in GHG emissions, multiply by $36, and voila!
Zycher takes us through the absurdities of just how small the impact of Obama’s “climate” actions is on the actual climate and how the actions are enormously magnified they become when they are run through the social cost of carbon. He concludes:
It is the delegation of legislative powers to the regulatory agencies that has allowed such game‐playing in pursuit of an ideological agenda. The only means with which to restore political accountability to the regulatory process is a requirement that all regulations be approved by Congress.
You can check out his entire article, here.
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