Bloomberg: “Trump Aims to End Carbon Metric That Puts Price on Climate Harms”
RFF Fellow Brian Prest comments on a new executive order that involves changes to the social cost of carbon.
One legal barrier to eliminating the metric is a 2007 Ninth Circuit decision called Center for Biological Diversity v. NHTSA, which found that not incorporating the metric into rulemaking violates the Administrative Procedure Act.
For that reason, eliminating the social cost of carbon would essentially be unlawful, said Brian Prest, director of the social cost of carbon initiative at the think tank Resources for the Future...
Another option for the Trump team is to dial the dollar figure down, the same way the Biden administration turned it up. But that would take time and effort, and a future Democratic president could in turn undo that work, Prest said.
Recalculating the social cost of carbon could be even harder because Trump’s order disbands the interagency working group that spent years developing the metric.
