In the News

Jason Schwartz, a research scholar at New York University School of Law, slammed the Trump administration’s changes to calculations for the social cost of greenhouse gases. “They have begun to manipulate those estimates in ways that are not at all consistent with the best science or economics,” he said. A guide on the social cost of greenhouse gases co-authored by Schwartz and published by NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity argues that using a domestic-emissions-only approach doesn’t make sense for the United States or the rest of the world.

Legal and environmental experts warn that the Trump administration’s willingness to eschew scientific consensus for political advantage typifies a worrying trend. “The administration is definitely trying to mess with the numbers to make it look like they’re saving money on these repeals,” Denise Grab, western regional director for the Institute for Policy Integrity, told ThinkProgress. “But they aren’t considering the massive benefits to the public, and the economic and scientific consensus on the substantial benefits that could be achieved by reducing this greenhouse gas pollution.”

In this week’s Material World, Lindsey and Jenny dive into how changes in the environment are showing up in stores and businesses. Dr. Peter Howard, the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU’s School of Law, explains how changing global temperatures and climate could have ripple effects on businesses and shoppers. Bloomberg’s Jordyn Holman discusses her reporting in Puerto Rico after it was hit by Hurricane Maria and the director of the Florida Department of Citrus describes Hurricane Irma’s impact on growers.

Energy storage has long been viewed as the missing piece in the clean-energy puzzle. But the current discussion overlooks the possibility that as batteries and other storage technologies become cheaper and more pervasive, they could instead have the perverse consequence of increasing fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions.

Alongside those notices the agency released a cost-benefit analysis, which includes estimates of cost savings and climate benefits that the rule would have provided. The EPA’s original proposals to halt the standards had not included those climate benefits, Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said. Now, in the updated analysis, the agency “monkeyed with the numbers” by adjusting the social cost of methane value.

More broadly, the EPA under Trump (and administrator Scott Pruitt who, before taking that job, had sued the EPA multiple times) has dramatically cut its estimates of the long-term costs of greenhouse gas emissions as part of its effort to scale back an Obama administration rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. “After a few years out, basically we’re not counting any effects on any future generations of Americans,” NYU’s Jason Schwartz told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

This week, the public comment period closed on Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s plan to keep uncompetitive, inefficient and highly polluting coal plants from retiring. If successful, his plan will enrich coal executives and investors at the expense of working Americans, while having pernicious public health consequences.

Jason Schwartz, legal director for the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration has “decimated” the social cost of carbon. The new analysis makes several key changes that Schwartz said are out of step with the thinking of economists. The new value has been narrowed to only consider the domestic impacts of carbon, while the Obama administration’s version also took into account the global impacts, Schwartz noted. And in contrast to the Obama administration, which assumed a 3% discount rate, the new value assumes a 7% discount rate that Schwartz said “virtually no economist surveyed or written in the literature supports using.”

Pruitt is taking other steps to soften the ground for the weak rule he is expected to issue. Many of them involve monkeying around with cost-benefit analysis to make carbon regulation look as bad as possible. For more on these cost-benefit shenanigans, see this excellent piece from Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke of the Institute for Policy Integrity and the original reporting from Politico’s Emily Holden on which it’s based.

The Trump administration in an awkward place. Even after straining to show the repeal of the Obama-era rules would boost the economy by baking into their plan financial assumptions that many experts dispute, their plan as written still doesn’t do much for the sagging coal industry. “In order to justify this, they do serious violence to established economics,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, said of the repeal. “The level of contortions and the attacks on standard economic principles are unprecedented.”