Bloomberg
By Mark Drajem
Buried in a rule little noticed on microwave ovens is a change in the accounting of the U.S. Government for carbon emissions, which could have far-reaching consequences for all, power plants for the Keystone XL pipeline.
The increase of the social cost of carbon, $ 38 per metric tonne in 2015 of $23.80, supposedly adjusts the calculation, the Government uses to weigh the costs and benefits of the proposed regulations. The figure is supposed to bring losses of the warming of the planet such as flooding and reduced damage crops.
With the change, governmental actions which lead to reductions in emissions - anything, new standards for mileage at the energies own loans - will appear more valuable in its cost-benefit analyses. On the flipside, environmentalists urges that it be used to judge projects that could lead to more carbon pollution, such as the pipeline Keystone TransCanada Corp. (TRP) or the coal companies such as Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) on public lands, which would be considered as more expensive.
"As we learn from climate damage is worse and worse yet, there is no direction, they could go but upwards," Laurie Johnson, Chief Economist for the Natural Resources Defense Council climate, said in an interview. Johnson said that the administration should go further; It considers that the cost of carbon could be as much as $266 per tonne.
Even supporters questioned the way in which the administration has slipped out policy without opening it to the public comments. The change was buried in the afternoon announcement may 31 on efficiency standards for the microwave ovens, a rule, not considered revolutionary.
"It is a very strange way of doing politics for something this important," Frank Ackerman, an economist at Tufts University, who has published a book on the economics of the global warming, said in an interview. Administration Obama 'has not always leveled with us on what happens behind closed doors."
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