Via Billy
A central piece of President Trump’s executive order Tuesday nixes
the federal government’s use of the obscure “social cost of carbon”
calculation, ending an Obama-era experiment that put an official price
tag on greenhouse gas emissions.
The metric, first established in
2010 by an interagency working group that consulted with scientists and
others outside government, examined how carbon pollution would impact
public health, food crops, infrastructure and a host of other parts of
American life. The figure, which now stands at about $40 per ton of
carbon, according to the latest federal figures, was a key way in which
the Obama administration tried to financially justify its ambitious
climate change agenda. The Environmental Protection Agency would, for
example, claim that a given program, rule or regulation would save
billions of dollars by cutting emissions, and it arrived at those
estimates partly by using the social cost of carbon.