Biden returns to Obama’s ‘social cost of carbon’ value for now

Many economists had expected Biden to return to the Obama administration’s numbers in the near term. The Trump administration had dramatically slashed the social cost of carbon to between $1 and $7 per ton to help it justify rolling back or weakening climate change mandates. Some prominent economists, however, suggested the Biden team should settle on interim values twice as high, around $100 per ton. That included Michael Greenstone, the former chief economist in the Obama White House who led development of the initial social cost of carbon. Those economists arrived at that number by using a lower discount rate, which determines how to weigh the costs people incur in the present against the benefits people would feel in the future.