Biden Raises Key Metric for Greenhouse Gases
E&E News' lead story on March 1 featured insight from RFF President Richard Newell and Senior Fellow Alan Krupnick about the social cost of carbon.
"'There needs to be a consistency between the approaches used for the social cost of carbon and other regulatory actions,' said Richard Newell, president and CEO of Resources for the Future and a co-chair of a 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on how the social cost figures should be updated and maintained. Lowering the discount rate for the social cost of carbon only and not for regulatory analyses more generally, he said, 'would be a mistake and would actually open the estimates to criticism for inconsistency,' including in the courts...
'We found that the social cost of carbon that you use, whether you use the global social cost of carbon or the domestic social cost of carbon, was determinative in whether the benefits exceeded the cost of repeal or the costs exceeded the benefits,' said Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow with Resources for the Future and one of the authors of [an RFF analysis of Trump-era methane rules]. 'So it's a critical parameter, certainly for rules where greenhouse gas reductions are a major source of the benefits.'"
