In the News

I’m tempted to call it the decade’s most important paper on the costs of climate damage. The paper, just published in Environmental and Resource Economics, by Peter Howard, economics director at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity; and Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg, upends the long-prevailing approach for estimating the social cost of carbon, potentially laying the ground for putting the SCC into triple digits.

Oren Cass’s article “Who’s the Denier Now?” (May 1) condemns the misuse of scientific data in climate-change policy debates, but to support his position Cass misrepresents the findings in our survey of economists and cherry-picks survey data to suggest that “economists hold widely varying views” on the costs of climate change.

The Trump administration has diagnosed a legitimate problem with distorted energy markets, but an honest attempt to stop picking winners would require eliminating all subsidies, many of which favor coal.

Climate economist Peter Howard, the economics director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the assessment paper provided “insufficient reasons for abandoning a 2°C limit”.

Trump’s final decision on Paris will still tell us a great deal about how the administration plans to go about the business of undermining climate progress, and how successful it is ultimately likely to be.

“A new delay would essentially amount to an effective repeal and that is something that would have to be justified,” Bethany Davis Noll, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, tells the publication. “Labor has a huge burden to overcome if they want to delay this.”

State climate policy efforts not only help reduce emissions, but provide a means of political experimentation that offers data on what might work to escape the climate policy gridlock. There are many contexts in which well-organized and well-networked interest groups will be in a better position to learn from experimentation than public interest groups. Thus the “peril” associated with experimentation: the bad guys may often be able to translate political information into policy advantage.

New York, as a leader in energy policy, has embraced the Social Cost of Carbon in many recent landmark regulatory decisions. But now the state Public Service Commission is being wrongly attacked for using the SCC in its zero-emission credits (ZECs) program. If the Legislature halts this program, it would be a massive setback for climate change action in New York and around the country.

Under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Maryland has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency for help bringing ozone pollution in the state to a safe level. Granting this request should be a no-brainer for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

“My guess is that the bulk of the litigation is ahead of us,” said Richard Revesz, an environmental and regulatory law expert at New York University School of Law. “All this litigation is going to consume the full four years.”