The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the Biden administration to use a higher estimate for calculating damages to people and the environment from greenhouse gas emissions, despite a challenge by Republican-led states.
In a decision last Thursday, the justices did not comment in refusing to put back in place an order from a federal judge in Louisiana that had blocked the administration from putting greater emphasis on potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions in setting rules for polluting industries, The Associated Press reports.
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The approach uses the social cost of carbon to calculate future climate damages to justify tougher restrictions on fossil fuels, transportation, and other industries.
After the federal appeals court in New Orleans put the order on hold, Louisiana led nine states in asking the high court to intervene.
The justices’ refusal to do so allows the administration to use an interim standard of US$51 to calculate the damage from a ton of carbon dioxide emitted while it works to update and possibly increase the number. The $51 figure was used by the Obama administration before the Trump administration cut it to $7.
In a paper published in February 2021, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, urged the then newly-installed Biden administration to peg the social cost of carbon at a minimum $100 per tonne.
Without the right benchmark, Bloomberg Green wrote at the time, “the authors warn that the U.S. is significantly underestimating the financial impact of carbon emissions and hindering President Biden’s efforts to steer the country toward a net-zero economy by 2050.”
By itself, the latest estimate does not impose any new requirements, but it could be used to justify tougher rules, AP explains. State governments would be free to challenge any new regulations.
This Associated Press story was republished by The Canadian Press on May 26, 2022
