Global warming update

Trump and MAGA falsely claim to believe that global warming is a hoax or trivial if it's not a hoax. The WaPo reports sad, but expected, news about their focused effort to stop trying to deal with global warming (not paywalled):

With the deluge of executive orders in the initial weeks of the second Trump administration, an important directive flew under the radar. It requires the federal government to consider abandoning “the social cost of carbon,” potentially undercutting all climate policymaking.

That is a technical way of signaling something simple and false: Climate change is not real. If the social cost of carbon is treated as zero, then greenhouse gas emissions inflict no damage. Regulations that reduce those emissions have no benefits, which suggests that those regulations should be eliminated.

The social cost of carbon has often been described as the most important number you’ve never heard of. The metric is meant to capture the harm caused by a ton of carbon emissions, making it a foundation of national climate change policy. A lower value would justify weaker regulations, while a higher one would warrant more aggressive policies.

Under the Obama administration, in which I served, the social cost of carbon was relatively modest: around $50/ton globally. As the Government Accountability Office found, the interagency process that led to that valuation was emphatically apolitical. The calculation, whose use was upheld in federal court, helped support numerous regulations involving fuel economy, energy efficiency and power plants.

To its credit, the first Trump administration maintained a social cost of carbon. But it made significant changes. By far the most important was to adjust the metric so that it would include only domestic damage.

Naturally, the harm inflicted within the United States is a mere fraction of that imposed on the world. The $50 figure immediately fell to about $7, meaning that the benefits of emissions reductions would be a lot smaller. The Trump administration’s use of the domestic number for greenhouse gases was struck down in federal court as being arbitrary under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Biden administration shifted back to the global number. Its Environmental Protection Agency extensively analyzed the most recent evidence of the likely harms from climate change and the “discount rate,” or the rate by which we discount future harms. With a discount rate of 2 percent, it landed on $190. That figure is not out of line with expert opinion, and many believe a higher number is more realistic.

That speaks for itself. Trump and MAGA are intensely hostile to even admitting that global warming is real. They try to hide the truth about the damages that carbon pollution causes. Trump and MAGA deeply disrespect the American people, its rule of law, and democracy generally. We are being deceived, lied to and betrayed by kleptocratic authoritarians.

By Germaine: Mourning the loss of rational, honest governance and respect for our environment