Study: Carbon Cost Should Be 3.6 Times Higher

Every ton of carbon dioxide that comes out of a smokestack or exhaust pipe does far more damage than governments take into account, researchers concluded in a scientific paper published in September.

Large hurricanes bring with them more and more rainfall, and wildfires, droughts and downpours are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity due to climate change, causing the loss of communities, homes and lives around the world. But what is the real dollar cost of the carbon emissions driving climate change?

That’s what researchers in various fields — science, economics, medicine — are trying to figure out through a metric called the social cost of carbon, a price that represents the total climate damage caused to society by carbon emissions. It has been used in the past to justify stricter limits on carbon emissions and increased spending on climate solutions, such as transitioning to renewables and protecting against natural floods.

Currently, the U.S. government uses a price of $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, but the researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the price should be $185 per ton, or 3.6 times higher than the current U.S. standard.

“Our results suggest that we are vastly underestimating the damage caused by each additional ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Kevin Rennert, study author and director of the federal climate policy initiative at Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization. Global warming is greater than has been estimated.”

Rennert and his colleagues created an updated model to measure the social cost of carbon emissions, which includes several measures excluded in previous research. According to them, the main additions include better accounting for future climate policy uncertainty, economic growth and environmental phenomena such as sea level rise. They also include damage to ecosystems, biodiversity and human health, which were previously ignored.

The changes were made in response to a 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, which noted that current calculations for carbon pricing were inadequate and gave several recommendations for quickly updating outdated models.

Source: Los Angeles Times