Carbon should cost 3.6 times more than US price, study says

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “Our results suggest that we are vastly underestimating the harm from each additional ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Kevin Rennert, a study author and director of the federal climate policy initiative at Resources for the Future, an environmental nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “And the implication is that the benefits of government policies and other actions that reduce global warming pollution are greater than has been estimated." Researchers began calculating damages from carbon emissions in the 1980s and before 2017, the last updates to the modelling were in the early to mid 1990s, “when the Counting Crows were still at the top of the charts,” said Max Auffhammer, an author of the 2017 report and professor of international sustainable development at the University of California, Berkeley. The lowered estimate counted only damages felt in the U.S. Republicans have fought against using estimated future climate damages to steer policy, and officials in 23 states last year joined together on a pair of lawsuits claiming the Biden administration’s use of the social cost of carbon was illegal. In an analysis of the new climate law published last week by the White House Office of Management and Budget, officials wrote that “the interim social cost of carbon estimates are currently significantly underestimated because they do not account for many important climate damage categories, such as ocean acidification.” An agency spokesperson declined to give a timeline for a new cost estimate.