![]() It’s important to emphasize that Bressler’s estimate is only taking into account temperature-related mortality. On a per-capita basis, people in richer, cooler countries produce far more emissions than people in poorer, hotter countries who suffer most of the damage. This highlights one of the injustices of climate change. For example, it would take the combined lifetime emissions of 146.2 Nigerians to kill one person. That’s equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans. To break that down a bit: Bressler found that adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would result in one heat-related death this century. When Bressler factored in the projected deaths - what he calls “the mortality cost of carbon” - the SCC jumped to a whopping $258 per ton. His paper updates the SCC based on findings that have emerged in the last few years about heat-related deaths. In 2021, the economist Danny Bressler published a study in the journal Nature Communications that attempts to rectify that shortcoming. There was no centralized data source enabling scientists to access daily temperature-related mortality figures for each country, so deaths barely factored into the calculation. But due to a lack of reliable data, it didn’t. So you might think that the SCC would also include a decent estimate as to the number of climate-related deaths per ton. Record-shattering temperatures, which have led to recent heat waves like the one in India and Pakistan, make it painfully obvious that climate change isn’t a far-off threat - it’s already killing people. What we owe to future generations The cost of our carbon footprint - in human lives In addition to having major policy implications, this discussion has major moral implications: It goes to the heart of our ethical responsibility to care for future generations. Let’s look at each of these issues in turn to understand why some experts now say the true cost of carbon per ton should really be much, much higher than we’d thought. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present. First, until recently, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Sign up here.īut according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than even a $51 price tag suggests. Twice a week, we’ll send you a roundup of the best ideas and solutions for tackling the world’s biggest challenges - and how to get better at doing good. Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter Knowing that the SCC is used in regulating carbon-emitting projects, like oil and gas drilling, the red states had argued that the price tag is a “power grab” designed to “manipulate America’s entire federal regulatory apparatus through speculative costs and benefits.” Compared to $1, the $51 price tag the Biden administration reverted to is high - and the Republican states suing Biden, led by Louisiana, are not happy with it. The working group decided to go with an interim figure of $51 per ton - the same SCC the Obama administration used - until it could study the matter in depth and release a final determination that’s updated to the latest science.īut under the Trump administration, the SCC was as low as $1, in part because of a decision to factor in only domestic, not global, impacts of emissions. In 2021, Biden signed an executive order that tasked a working group with determining the social cost of carbon (SCC). At some point it just becomes cheaper to switch to sustainable systems instead of coping with all the wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves that result from unsustainable systems. But it represents a big setback for the Republican-led states that have been suing the president over the metric, known as the social cost of carbon: a measure, in dollars, of how much damage results from emitting 1 ton of carbon dioxide.īeing able to discuss the damage in terms of a precise dollar amount is important because it allows policymakers to show when the benefits of preventing global warming are greater than the costs. The court’s order, in refusing to put back an order from a federal judge in Louisiana that had blocked the administration, is just one line long. The Supreme Court decided on May 26 to allow President Joe Biden’s administration to continue using a key metric in the fight against climate change.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |