The Hill: "How 'Carbon Scoring' Can Help Congress Make Real Progress on Climate Change"
An op-ed coauthored by RFF Fellow Kevin Rennert details RFF's new Carbon Scoring Project, as well as complementary research conducted by RFF and the Brookings Institution to involve emissions reductions in the legislative process.
If, as a nation, we are to meet the emissions reduction goals necessary to stave off the climate crisis, we need to give the same level of care and consideration to our carbon emissions as we do financial impacts. Congress needs to start routinely measuring a bill’s expected effects on carbon emissions and put our climate goals at the fore of their decision-making process...
...Researchers at Resources for the Future and the Brookings Institution (where we work) are working together to create a system for assessing the carbon impact of legislation through a pair of complementary projects. Brookings will create a blueprint for a federal Office of Carbon Scoring, including the institutional, analytical and policy foundation... Resources for the Future will build upon its history of economic modeling to develop feasible carbon scores and how best to calculate them. Over the next few years, our projects will develop the foundation to carbon score climate-related legislative proposals that will, we hope, inform discussions and decision-making on both sides of the aisle in Congress in the near term."
