"The Most Important Number You've Never Heard Of"
An opinion piece in the New York Times focuses on a recent paper coauthored by RFF scholars and pulls on the knowledge of RFF President Richard Newell.
To find out more, this week I interviewed Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who was a commenter on the paper presented at Brookings, as well as Richard Newell, the president of the economics-oriented environmental group Resources for the Future, who was one of the paper’s 11 authors.
Newell is plugged in: He was a chair of a 2017 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine that prompted the new study. On his Inauguration Day, President Biden reconstituted an interagency working group on climate change that President Trump had disbanded and gave it one year to “listen to the science” and come up with a new calculation of the social cost of carbon.
