Carbon emissions cost society at least three times more than the government’s official estimate.
The United States doesn’t have any federal laws that say electric utilities have to switch to carbon-free power. We don’t yet have any national rules mandating the sale of electric vehicles or plans to phase out oil and gas drilling. Despite years of talk about a tax on carbon, we don’t have that either. What we do have, when it comes to regulations that address climate change, is a decidedly duller but still effective tool called the social cost of carbon, or SCC.
The Climate Council’s new report “The Lost Years: Counting the costs of climate inaction in Australia” provides a detailed overview of the Federal Government’s approach to climate change since the election of the Liberal-National Coalition in 2013. The Climate Council has assessed the Federal Government’s climate performance over the past eight years in detail and finds there’s been a complete and catastrophic failure to act on the climate crisis.
When asked to rate the government’s performance on climate change and response to worsening extreme weather events, everyday Australians gave an overall 3 out of 10. One in four (26%) surveyed rated the Morrison Government a 0 for ‘not doing anything at all’.
The past eight years have been characterised by cuts to climate-related funding and effective programs, the rejection of advice from scientists and both national and international expert bodies, a lack of credible climate policy and claims that mislead the public on what’s being done as well as what’s possible.
Australia’s next Federal Government must adopt credible climate policies as a matter of extreme urgency.
Lost Years
The social cost of carbon is a dollar amount that approximates the cost to society of adding — or the benefits of not adding — 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It is underpinned by scientific models that look deep into the future to estimate what that CO2 will mean in terms of lost lives, reduced crop yields, and damage caused by rising seas. The government uses this number as one of several key metrics to evaluate the costs and benefits of policies that affect greenhouse gas emissions, like fuel economy standards for vehicles or oil and gas leasing plans. It makes decisions that increase carbon output look a lot more expensive than those that do the opposite.
But perhaps not expensive enough. A new study published in the journal Nature on Thursday found that the social cost of carbon should be more than three times higher than the $51 dollar figure the Biden administration currently uses.
Worsening extreme weather means increased costs of maintenance, repair and replacement to properties – our homes, workplaces and commercial buildings. As the risk of being affected by extreme weather events increases, insurers will raise premiums to cover the increased cost of claims and reinsurance.
Insurance will become increasingly unaffordable or unavailable in large parts of Australia due to worsening extreme weather.
This report outlines the top 20 most at-risk federal electorates to climate change-related extreme weather events, providing a brief profile of the top 10. The report also outlines the most at risk electorates for each state and territory. Check out our Climate Risk Map to see if your area is at risk Uninsurable Nation
“We are vastly underestimating the harm of each additional ton of carbon dioxide that we release into the atmosphere,” said Richard Newell, president of the nonprofit think tank Resources for the Future and one of the authors of the study, in a press release. “The implication is that the benefits of government policies and other actions that reduce global warming pollution are greater than has been assumed.”
The study arrives as the administration’s plans to re-evaluate this crucial metric have stalled. One of Biden’s first executive actions called for publishing a new social cost of carbon by January 2022 along with recommendations for improving the way it is calculated. Progress was delayed by lawsuits, and the administration has not announced a new timeline for the update. In the interim, the government is using a social cost of carbon of about $51, relying on the methodology used by the Obama administration.
“This Administration remains committed to accounting for the costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible,” a spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told Grist. “We continue to assess how best to account for these costs in regulatory and budgetary contexts in the future.”
Acknowledging that the world as we know it is coming apart is an act of courage.
If I live to look back at this troubled time, I want to say that I did all that I could, that I was on the right side of history.
The question is, do you want to be part of the legacy that restores our faith in humanity?
When climate scientist Joëlle Gergis set to work on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, the research she encountered kept her up at night. Through countless hours spent with the world’s top scientists to piece together the latest global assessment of climate change, she realised that the impacts were occurring faster than anyone had predicted.
In Humanity’s Moment, Joëlle takes us through the science in the IPCC report with unflinching honesty, explaining what it means for our future, while sharing her personal reflections on bearing witness to the heartbreak of the climate emergency unfolding in real time. But this is not a lament for a lost world. It is an inspiring reminder that human history is an endless tug-of-war for social justice. We are each a part of an eternal evolutionary force that can transform our world.
Joëlle shows us that the solutions we need to live sustainably already exist – we just need the social movement and political will to create a better world. This book is a climate scientist’s guide to rekindling hope, and a call to action to restore our relationship with ourselves, each other and our planet. Humanity ‘s Moment
The new study finds that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted costs society about $185 in today’s dollars. To arrive at that number, the research team followed the recommendations laid out by a 2017 report by the National Academy of Sciences, an independent advisor to the federal government, that identified flaws in the Obama-era methodology. For example, the National Academies report noted that much of the climate research that fed into the official social cost of carbon, such as papers estimating the cost of agriculture and public health-related impacts of climate change, was from the 1990s and early 2000s. Experts have also criticized the government’s method for not adequately accounting for the range of uncertainty in the underlying climate and economic models.
Kevin Rennert, director of the federal climate policy initiative at Resources for the Future and one of the lead authors of the new study, said he and his co-authors used updated climate models and estimates for population and economic growth that better account for the uncertainty of those predictions. They also incorporated the latest science on translating changes in the climate system into damages in the economy, bringing in expertise from different disciplines. For example, another one of the authors, Kevin Cromar, an associate professor at New York University’s school of medicine, convened 26 public health experts and climate economists last year to improve estimates of how each 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase in temperature will affect mortality around the world.
“That’s been a really fundamental piece of our work to try to have those with subject expertise feeding into the process,” said Rennert. They found that their estimate of deaths related to climate change was the largest factor driving up the social cost of carbon, contributing about $90 to the $185 total.
Tamma Carleton, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved with the study, said it “marks a substantial improvement upon SCC estimates previously developed by the U.S. government, underscoring the importance of keeping policy values in line with the scientific frontier.” Carleton is part of another team assessing the costs of climate change.
The authors note that even their estimate is conservative. Their model does not account for a number of costs associated with rising temperatures, like biodiversity loss, reduced labor productivity, increased conflict and violence, and climate-related migration. But in addition to calculating a new social cost of carbon, they created a model and software that other researchers can download and run for free, enabling other subject matter experts to “to write a very small piece of code that represents their research and feed it into the broader community that is building these models,” said Rennert.
“These tools will make it easy for future scientists that haven’t even thought about the social cost of carbon yet to bring their expertise to this very important problem in a transparent way,” he added. “That is what is going to continue to evolve the science.”
Climate Action Australia 