A Court Ruling That Could Save the Planet

Judges uphold building the worldwide social cost of carbon into new regulations.

Source: A Court Ruling That Could Save the Planet

The social cost of carbon is meant to capture the economic damage of a ton of carbon emissions. The assumptions that go into the analysis, and the resulting number, matter a lot, because they play a key role in the cost-benefit analysis for countless regulations — not only the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, but also fuel-economy rules for automobiles and trucks and energy-efficiency rules for appliances, including refrigerators, microwave ovens, clothes washers, clothes driers and small motors. The cost-benefit analysis can in turn help agencies to determine the level of stringency for such regulations, and indeed whether to go forward at all.