States sue to block “social cost” of carbon

Twelve states have asked a Federal Court to keep federal agencies from using the so-called Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases to calculate the benefits of emission reduction regulations.

The new cost estimates, ordered by President Biden on day one, claim enormous distant future damages from today’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Preventing these supposed damages could justify massive new regulations, but the States say this is illegal because Congress never authorized it.

The Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) has been around for some time. Obama introduced it as a policy measure, which Trump then canceled. Now Biden has brought it back and made it worse.

In a way SCC personifies the craziness of the climate scare. The whole scare is based on outlandish doomsday computer models and SCC is arguably the most absurd of all.

The fundamental absurdity of the Social Cost of Carbon is that it goes out 300 years to get the supposed economic damages due to today’s minor emissions of carbon dioxide. That’s right, these computer models claim to know what the world’s economy will be for the next 300 years. The claim is absurd because technological and economic progress make the future world unknowable.

The fact that today we have computers does not make our next 300 years any more predictable than their 300 was in 1720. Given that the pace of technological change has increased our future is probably even less knowable.

Since the 300 year prediction claims of SCC are absurd, why do the alarmists make them? It is the only way they can get serious future damages out of the computer models. Even in these hot models, the annual adverse impact of our emissions is very small. But according to the models this small impact goes on for hundreds of years so it adds up. This extreme assumption itself is unproven.

Even worse, the damage is estimated as a fixed fraction of economic activity, so it increases every year as the economy grows. In 300 years the global economy grows tremendously, just as it did in the last 300 years. The near term damages are negligible. In some models the CO2 increase is actually beneficial in the short run.

This economic growth factor is an important part of the SCC scam, because it negates what is called the “discount rate”. In cost benefit analysis, future costs are discounted back to present value, sort of like reverse compound interest. The further into the future a given amount of damage is, the less it is worth today. The amount of this discounting is the discount rate, which is typically around 3 to 5% per year.

Normally this discounting makes distant future costs negligible. But SCC computer modeling gets around it by having the global economy grow faster than the discount rate.

They even claim to know the cumulative 300 year economic damages due to our emissions to an exact dollar per ton amount. I am not making this up. Given the scam it is no surprise that this amount corresponds to the amount of proposed carbon taxes. Moreover, it increases every year, just like the proposed taxes and carbon control regulations.

Biden widened the scam by adding the Social Cost of Methane (and Nitrous Oxide). Natural gas is mostly methane so this is part of the new war on gas. But cows are also a major source so now we have a war on cows. The Agriculture Department, which regulates cows, is included in the Social Cost executive order, so they are being sued along with EPA and a bunch of other regulatory agencies.

I know. The whole thing is so damn stupid. I just ask “what is the ideal temperature for the earth” because if they cannot answer that simple question then all of their idiocy is just spinning wheels. And they cannot answer it because they do not know. What we do know is that possibly a slight increase in temperature and CO2 would be better for life on earth in general.

Personally, it’s like tilting at windmills for people to try to control the earth (though really, they just want to control people). I am content with making sure we all have clean water and clean air. And some cities in America cannot even provide clean potable water. But there is no outcry.

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