Refusing to let any crisis, even the government-created ones, go to waste #TeamBiden wants the "social cost of carbon" to get inflated along with everything else.
Politico (4/20/22) reports: "he social cost of carbon was initially a wonky metric that Barack Obama's agencies used to help guide policy with the economic consequences of climate change in mind...The metric — an estimate of the economic impact of adding carbon dioxide the atmosphere — has become an increasingly crucial foundation for President Joe Biden's climate actions. It guides climate considerations for issues such as public transit grants, oil and gas lease sales and energy efficiency regulations, and it offers an economic baseline that the administration can use to defend its policies in court. And its importance has grown after Democrats' Build Back Better bill stalled in the Senate, which left regulations as a major avenue for pushing climate action...How to calculate the social cost of carbon has also become a deeply political question: The Obama administration set it at $43 per ton of carbon dioxide, but the Trump administration whittled it down to $1 before Biden raised it back to $51 per ton. With better understanding of how climate change is affecting the world, some experts are calling for a price closer to the $200 range, a number that would make it vastly easier to justify efforts to throttle greenhouse gas emissions. 'The reason that you have this sort of ping-ponging of the social cost of carbon is that it's being utilized by the bureaucracy to achieve an end,' said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which supports fossil fuels and is critical of the social cost metric. 'Each administration has its own ideology about what they want to accomplish, and the way that it was constructed, it's so subject to gaming that you're witnessing the result.'"
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