The Obama climate move that nobody noticed "The Obama administration just made a fairly significant move on climate change, and it flew right under the radar." __ "Last week, the White House put up a blog post touting new energy-efficiency standards for microwave ovens. Thrilling, right? Halfway down, it mentions that “the underlying analysis of these standards includes an update to the social cost of carbon values.” Oh? Sure enough, over on OMB’s website we find a “Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis” [PDF], dated May 2013. It doesn’t change the basic mechanics of the earlier analysis — same discount rates, same emission scenarios, same climate sensitivity. All it does is update the climate impact models (the “Integrated Assessment Models”) to reflect the most recent versions used in the peer-reviewed literature. Here’s the result: The [social cost of carbon] estimates using the updated versions of the models are higher than those reported in the 2010 [report]. By way of comparison, the four 2020 SCC estimates reported in the 2010 [report] were $7, $26, $42 and $81 (2007$). The corresponding four updated SCC estimates for 2020 are $12, $43, $65, and $129 (2007$). You don’t have to be an economist to see that the second set of numbers is about 60 percent higher than the first. Why the big jump? It sounds like it mostly had to do with the models updating their estimates of damage from sea-level rise, though there are several other factors as well. (Suffice to say, the news from climate scientists lately has not been good.)"--fta grist.org/climate-energy/the-obama-climate-move-that-nobody-noticed/
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:37:43 +0000
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