A federally funded research group is recommending changes to the way the Obama administration measures the “social cost” of carbon dioxide emissions when developing climate rules for power plants, cars and appliances.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a interim report Tuesday directing the administration to disclose more of the information it uses in developing the “social cost of carbon” that it uses to justify its emission rules.
Nevertheless, it is not clear if the changes would satisfy the concerns raised by Republicans and other critics over the use of the metric, which they say is not transparent and can raise the stringency of regulations unnecessarily.
The House in September passed a measure that would ban agencies from using the social cost of carbon in developing rules. Republicans do not trust the cost metric, developed through an interagency working group led by the White House. They believe it is inaccurate and can raise the cost of federal regulations.
The metric is used to help calculate the cost benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or carbon dioxide, through implementing regulations. Many scientists blame carbon emissions for creating manmade climate change, which leads to more severe weather, flooding, drought and famine. The damages from the effects of climate change go into assessing the metric.
The National Academies interim study recommends that the White House-led effort not proceed with an update to the metric by taking into account new data from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It says a better use of the White House’s time would be to create a “module” that would represent “the relationship between CO2 emissions and global mean surface temperature change, its uncertainty, and its profile over time.” That would be used to describe the relationship between “emissions and temperature change, its pattern over time, and its uncertainty.”
“The proposed module should strive for simplicity and transparency so that the central tendency and range of uncertainty in its behavior are readily understood, are reproducible, and are amenable to continuous improvement over time through the incorporation of evolving scientific evidence,” the interim report says.
It also says that the White House-led working group should focus on providing explanations of how it measures uncertainties in measuring the social cost of carbon and include a section on how it treats uncertainty in its technical support documents.
“This section should discuss various types of uncertainty and how they were handled in estimating the [social cost of carbon], as well as sources of uncertainty that are not captured in current SCC estimates,” it says in its recommendations to the administration.
