Recent Projects

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is currently conducting a review of the methodologies used to calculate the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). We submitted comments to NAS to help inform this process. The SCC is the U.S. government’s official valuation of the economic damage from each additional ton of carbon dioxide that is emitted, and our research has repeatedly shown that this metric omits key damages from climate change. Our comments to NAS urge the review panel to push for clearer presentations of the SCC’s ranges of estimates in government documents; encourage the use of appropriate discount rates; endorse a global SCC valuation; adopt a certainty-equivalent SCC as the central estimate for use in decisionmaking; and take other steps to encourage the continued refinement of this metric.