Over at my “Political Questions” Substack site today I have a piece about Cass Sunstein that briefly treats the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), a key part of the climate policy debate. It’s an arcane subject in econometrics that can quickly generate a headache. In one sentence SCC is the attempt to calculate the net present value of the economic damage climate change will supposedly exact decades from now if we don’t conquer it immediately. For any readers curious about some of the technical aspects of this, I recommend Ben Zycher’s article “The Social Cost of Carbon, Greenhouse Gas Policies, and The Social Cost of Carbon, Greenhouse Gas Policies, and Politicized Benefit/Cost Analysis” published in the Texas A & M Law Review.
For the rest of us laypeople, the evidence that there is serious funny business going on with the purported social cost of carbon is ironically provided by Sunstein himself in a Washington Post article. Have a look at his chart in the article and ask yourself whether economic science changed from administration to administration, or whether economists are fiddling with their assumptions:
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