Pirate's Cove

I’ll write it again: people thought I was nuts back in the early 2000’s when I said the whole global warming, now ‘climate change’, movement was a grift that was meant to increase the power of government. That it is about authoritarianism. And this is just more proof that I was completely correct from my little perch

The most important number you’ve never heard of was just gutted

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. 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.

At the end of the day, though, this is a control on you. This was always something meant for government to put a control on you peasants, via taxation/fees and restriction mandates. Not for the elites, of course. And it has always smacked of Modern Socialism (you can call it communism, Marxism, Fascism, whatever). China loves this type of stuff.

President Donald Trump’s executive order presents a dramatic shift and a potentially lawless abandonment of the whole enterprise.

But, nowhere can this opinion piece point to what law was potentially broken. Because there is none. Guidance from OMB is not law.

The simplest reason to use the global figure is moral. If one country is imposing harms on another, its policymaking should take those harms into account. Morality aside, leading economists have insisted that the global number, or something close to it, is the right choice for the United States’ self-interest, too.

If it is so immoral to not do the communist cost of carbon, why do so few Warmists practice what they preach?

There’s a lot that can be done to rethink the social cost of carbon, but one thing is clear: The U.S. government cannot treat that number as if it is zero. Climate change is real. No president, and no federal agency, has the authority to pretend otherwise.

Yes, it can. Trump won. When Obama won we were told to sit down and shut up. Same with Biden. Well, elections have consequences. Suck it up, Comrades.