externalities
Editorial
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Three things Christine Lagarde can do to cement her legacy on climate.
Managing Director Lagarde has positioned the IMF as an important and credible voice in the debate about climate change. Now it’s time for the Fund to expand and institutionalize this new role, helping poor and vulnerable countries understand and confront the macroeconomic and financial risks of climate change.
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 11 2017 (IPS) - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and climate change do not often appear in the same headline together. Indeed, environmental issues have been, at most, peripheral to the Fund’s core functions. But now economists inside and outside the IMF are beginning to understand that climate change has significant implications for national and regional economies, and so it’s worth reconsidering the Fund’s role in addressing the climate challenge.
To her credit, Managing Director Christine Lagarde has boldly injected the IMF’s voice into the global debate on policy responses to climate change and has identified a number of roles the Fund can play.
The Fund has conducted valuable work on how carbon emissions can be reduced through market prices that reflect the negative externalities of those emissions. In particular, the Fund has become a leading voice for quantifying and streamlining or eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, as well as for introducing carbon-pricing mechanisms.
What is still missing, however, is a bigger role for the IMF in enabling countries to prepare and manage the potential impacts of climate change. There are three things the Fund could do, building on its current efforts, that would make a big difference:
1. Deepen Research on Macroeconomic and Financial Impacts of Climate Change
In a climate change debate that has become heavily politicized, the Fund’s technical and nonpartisan voice is uniquely valuable. Few questions are as important as understanding the possible effects of a changing climate on the world’s economies, especially the most vulnerable ones.
The Fund has recently started to make important contributions in this area. In a paper published last year, the IMF started to look into the implications of climate change on so-called “small states”. And last week, the Fund devoted for the first time a whole chapter of its flagship World Economic Outlook to the impacts of weather shocks on economic activity.
Building on these foundations, the Fund should focus its research capabilities on a key question, namely whether climate change is having have a “level effect” or a “growth effect” on per capita income. If the former, then climate change will only destroy a given amount of income over time (think of damaged bridges and buildings) but not affect the capacity of the economy itself to grow. If the latter, then climate change is also harming the drivers of growth themselves, such as the productivity and availability of workers, the productivity of agriculture, and the flow of investment. The economy’s growth rate will slow as a result, and losses will compound year after year, leaving an economy significantly worse off than if only level effects applied.
Getting better answers to this question is essential for policymakers making decisions about how much to spend today to avoid damage tomorrow.
2. Formally Incorporate Climate Change Into Policy Dialogue
One of the Fund’s core functions is macroeconomic surveillance. This function brings Fund staff into regular policy dialogues (called Article IV consultations) with financial authorities in virtually every country in the world.
Financial authorities have a key role to play in preparing for climate change, as they are charged with budget planning and managing fiscal and financial risks. The Fund should bring climate risk into the dialogue as a formal part of its consultations, not just with small states, but with a much larger set of vulnerable countries as well, including systemically-significant ones.
This year, in collaboration with the World Bank, the Fund launched the first Climate Change Policy Assessment (CCPA) during the Article IV consultations for the Seychelles. The assessment focused on policy options to reduce vulnerability to climate change; the Seychelle authorities found it to be very useful. More CCPAs are planned – a small handful per year – but this is simply not fast enough given the urgency and gravity of the challenge.
The Fund should formalize CCPAs as a routine part of Article IV consultations for a broad swathe of vulnerable, low-income countries. This will require investing in staff capacity and training, including in the Fund’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, which can help countries identify how climate risks and opportunities could affect their financial systems. Maximizing synergies with the World Bank on the CCPAs will also be necessary.
3. Treat Expenditures on Climate Resilience as Investments
Countries facing a balance-of-payments crisis often draw on IMF resources and enter into a program relationship with the IMF. One of the trickiest elements when negotiating such a program is how to treat different categories of spending and where to cut to restore fiscal balance. How should the Fund treat expenditures designed to provide financial protection against extreme weather events? These include, for example, deposits into a national reserve fund, premium payments on sovereign insurance against natural disasters, or the costs of issuing catastrophe (“cat”) bonds.
Protecting some of these expenditures from program-mandated cuts is fully appropriate, as they are designed to provide a measure of fiscal protection to the government in the aftermath of an extreme weather event. For instance, the Fund might treat cat bond issuance costs and insurance premiums as investments with potential upside, rather than as expenditures, thereby exempting them from cuts.
Managing Director Lagarde has positioned the IMF as an important and credible voice in the debate about climate change. Now it’s time for the Fund to expand and institutionalize this new role, helping poor and vulnerable countries understand and confront the macroeconomic and financial risks of climate change.
“This article was originally posted at World Resources Institute’s Insights blog”
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Whitehouse's floor soliloquies chug on. Is anyone listening?
For the 180th time, Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor this month to warn of the perils of climate change, blasting the fossil fuel industry, corporate greed and the failure of market capitalism to address global warming.
For the 180th time, Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor this month to warn of the perils of climate change, blasting the fossil fuel industry, corporate greed and the failure of market capitalism to address global warming.
Each week for years, largely without fail, the junior senator from Rhode Island waxes philosphical about ocean acidification, atmospheric temperature rise, devastated coastal communities, increases in storms, fires and floods. And every week, he urges Congress and the American people to act before it is too late.
But is anyone listening?
"I don't know," the Democrat recently told E&E; News during a sit-down in his office. "After all that effort, I certainly hope and pray it had an impact."
Whitehouse has gained a reputation as a lefty progressive with anti-capitalist undertones who rages against greedy corporate interests and the Koch brothers.
But he said he sees market capitalism as the most effective way to address global warming, much more so than increased regulation, a common Democratic battle cry. And the climate hawk is working to find common ground with those who once appeared to be his enemies.
In the wake of unprecedented extreme weather events such as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria, the subject of climate change is back in the spotlight. And the administration's move to kill the Clean Power Plan gives lawmakers more room to act.
In a change from years past, more Republicans are joining Whitehouse and beginning to call for action. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last month he would work with Whitehouse on a bipartisan carbon fee bill.
"I'm a Republican. I believe that the greenhouse gas effect is real, that CO2 emissions generated by man is creating our greenhouse gas effect that traps heat and the planet is warming," Graham said during a press conference (Greenwire, Sept. 20).
Even though many activists on the left want caps on emissions, Whitehouse says a carbon fee is much more efficient. "You get much more climate bang for your effort buck," he said.
And while he is not shy to criticize the GOP for what he considers inaction on the global warming issue, he is equally willing to call out fellow Democrats, as well.
"Remember Will Rogers? The 1930s-era comedian who said, 'I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat,'" he said. "No, we've done an absolutely crap job of fighting this fight. We allowed it to become polar bears versus jobs, which is ridiculous on both sides."
There are more jobs in green energy and renewables now than in the fossil fuel industry, he said. "And it's not polar bears that are suffering, it's beaches and fishermen and farmers right here in the United States."
'Capitalism is the solution'
At issue, Whitehouse said, is not capitalism as an economic system, but rather what he sees as a perversion of that system.
"I think market capitalism is the solution to the problem," he said. "The difficulty here is that market capitalism has been twisted by the fossil fuel industry, and they have completely polluted and captured our politics so that the natural course of things has been interfered with."
The "natural course" refers to an inevitable market collapse that often accompanies innovation. Whitehouse said when the economy shifts, for example, from horses to internal combustion engines, there is a "quite precipitous and quite painful" fallout, but it is usually contained within the affected industries.
"In this case, we spin this out too far; while we're waiting for that natural eventual precipitous market collapse [of the fossil fuel industry] to take place, we're also doing all this other damage that will then come back to haunt us, and for which there will be considerable blame," he said.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on the Senate floor. C-SPAN
Critics believe the very nature of capitalism works against environmental protection. In her award-winning book "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," author Naomi Klein argues capitalism necessitates ongoing economic growth.
The ever-growing consumption model requires never-ending resource extraction, she says, thereby exacerbating global warming through continued carbon emissions. Klein, and others on the left, are pushing for a new economic model.
This idea runs counter to Whitehouse's position. He argues market capitalism is not inherently problematic, but rather has been "torqued and polluted and ruined" by the fossil fuel industry.
More specifically, the industry "enjoys" an annual subsidy in the United States of more than a half-trillion dollars a year, according to the International Monetary Fund, he said.
"In theory, under market capitalism, those negative externalities in the amount of $700 billion a year ought to be baked into the price of the product," he said.
In economic theory, a negative externality is the cost that is suffered by a third party as the result of a market transaction.
"The markets work, but when you have negative externalities not in the price, that's an economic failure, an economic dislocation," Whitehouse said. "But because it's so to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry, they've stepped over into the political side and have just beat the hell out of everybody in order to protect that massive subsidy."
Whitehouse said that usually, on the political side, lawmakers would recognize the $700 billion as a negative externality, but Republicans — he thinks — have become indebted to industry donors.
"You can't smoke in airplanes any longer because now we know what secondhand smoke does to children sitting next to you in the airplane," he said. "They won't let us do the equivalent of that for climate change because they make too much money off of the status quo."
For Whitehouse, the fight for climate action is not only a fight for the preservation of the planet, but also for what he sees as core American values.
'Baked into me'
The child of a prominent diplomatic family, Whitehouse said he spent time in places such as Laos and Turkey growing up, and watching his kin make sacrifices for high ideals had an effect.
"I spent my life as the son and grandson of Foreign Service officers, and we were not on the champagne and cocktails diplomatic circuit," he said. "We were in poverty-ridden countries, and we were in countries at war, and what I grew up around were Americans who put themselves and their families in harm's way because they believed in something."
It was evident to him from an early age that something about America was important enough for family and friends to subject their loved ones to malaria, dirty drinking water or poor living conditions.
"They do it because something matters. So that got baked into me pretty hard," he said.
"And if we have let this temple of democracy that men and women fought and bled and died to create and preserve get corrupted by one special interest in a way that will harm the lives of people all around the world and bring the democracy that we cherish into disrepute, shame on us."
Whitehouse first became passionate about climate change through his wife, a marine biologist who shared her findings concerning sea-level rise and ocean acidification in their home-state Narragansett Bay.
"The bay in which my wife did her research on winter flounder has risen nearly 4 degrees medium underwater temperature, and the flounder that she used to study are virtually gone," he said.
'Boom'
When Whitehouse arrived on the Hill in 2007, lawmakers were taking climate change seriously and working to draft a solution, he said. From 2007 to 2009, there were "bipartisan bills coming out of all sorts of places," he said. In 2008, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran for president on a climate change platform Whitehouse considered "great."
"And I thought, OK, this is a scientific problem, but government is working on this, we're doing our job," he said. "Then comes 2010, Citizens United decision. Requested and forecasted by the fossil fuel industry from the five Republicans on the Supreme Court and boom, like sprinters at the starting gun, they were off."
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the 2010 landmark Supreme Court case, which lifted restrictions on how much money large corporations can invest in political campaigns.
Since 2010, there has not been a Republican co-sponsor, with Graham as a potential exception, of serious carbon emissions reduction legislation, Whitehouse said.
"The fossil fuel industry took that huge political weaponry that they were given by the five Republicans on the Supreme Court in Citizens United and they turned it on the Republican Party and they crushed dissent, and they made [climate] look like a partisan issue, which it is not," he said.
'Science got me scared'
When a carbon cap-and-trade bill passed the House in 2009 but failed to gain traction in the Democrat-controlled Senate, Whitehouse was furious and began taking on the Senate floor to vent his frustrations with Congress' lack of action.
"The science got me scared, watching the corruption of the government that I love happen in front of my eyes got me mad," he said.
"So at that point, I thought, well, somebody has got to say something, just to let people know that the lights have not gone out here. The only way to do that around here with people as busy as they are is to put yourself on a schedule and tell your office every week, no excuses, no exceptions, I'm going to the floor."
And despite the yearslong quest, Whitehouse is convinced the climate change fight can be won. "I wouldn't rule out a carbon fee," he said. A confluence of action has given him hope.
In addition to Graham's announcement, large oil and gas players have said they support a carbon fee.
"Although they're lying, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, all the big oil companies, pretend to support carbon fee," he said. "So there's significance in their pretense, if they know they've got to at least pretend."
There is building support for a carbon fee in the business community, he said. In fact, more than 1,200 business across the globe, including U.S. companies like General Motors Co., are voluntarily assigning a dollar value to carbon dioxide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Greenwire, Sept. 12).
And lastly, Whitehouse cited President Trump himself, who in 2009 signed onto a full-page ad in The New York Times saying climate change science is irrefutable and the consequences will be catastrophic and irreversible (E&E; News PM, Oct. 2).
"So is it a long shot? Yes, but those are all pretty interesting pieces that could come together as this thing develops," Whitehouse said.
"Ultimately, we win. We just hope that we don't win too late."
Twitter: @AriannaSkibell Email: askibell@eenews.net
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States are using social cost of carbon in energy decisions, despite Trump's views.
The climate metric, maligned by the Trump administration, helps build the cost of future climate harms into state electricity plans and markets.
The climate metric, maligned by the Trump administration, helps build the cost of future climate harms into state electricity plans and markets.
BY PETER FAIRLEY, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS
AUG 14, 2017
The social cost of carbon takes into account the costs of future damage to human health, property and the environment connected to the burning of fossil fuels. Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The social cost of carbon was an arcane but important tool in the federal climate toolbox until President Donald Trump targeted it in his sweeping March 2017 executive order to weaken climate actions.
Now, states are taking up the metric.
Policymakers and regulators in several states, including New York, Minnesota, Illinois and Colorado, are using the social cost of carbon to measure and reduce CO2 impacts from their power grids. Some are using it to compensate rooftop solar panel owners who feed low-carbon power in the grid. Others use it to incentivize nuclear power and renewable energy. Their efforts, aimed at reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, come as Congress and the Trump administration try to restrict its use.
"It's been striking to see the progress on this front even as the Trump administration has tried to undermine the use of a social cost of carbon," said Rachel Cleetus, chief economist and manager of the climate program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Put simply, the social cost of carbon is a dollar estimate of the future damages from droughts, sea level rise, heat waves and other climate impacts wrought by each ton of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere. Climate change caused by planet-warming CO2 emitted by fossil fuel power plants will diminish ecosystems, damage infrastructure and harm people's health, but until there is a price on carbon, most of those costs will not be paid by power generators or passed on to their consumers. Instead they will be borne by the environment and the public.
By calculating a cost in today's dollars for these impacts, and using it when regulating energy investments and implementing climate policies, the states can put cleaner energy sources on a more level playing field with fossil fuels. Wind and solar farms, nuclear power and energy conservation efforts are often less expensive than harmful alternatives when the damage potential of fossil fuels is taken into account.
Many corporations use a similar approach by incorporating a "shadow carbon price," which bakes the future costs of climate change into their decision-making, Cleetus notes. Putting a price on carbon adds to today's cost of polluting power plants, helping companies to more accurately evaluate how expensive these long-term investments could be in the future, especially if stronger climate policies down the road lead to plant shutdowns before they reach the end of their lifespan.
"When making investments that are going to be around for decades, you want to make sure they take account of future conditions," Cleetus said.
Until recently, the use of a social cost of carbon at the state level has been overshadowed by another means of putting a price on carbon—"cap-and-trade" markets, such as California's, which set a cap on statewide emissions but allow companies to buy or sell emissions allowances within that cap.
But experts say state adoption of a social cost of carbon may have even greater impact, because social cost of carbon estimates are typically higher than carbon market prices. While states are using a variety of values for a social cost of carbon, most are above $40 per ton—about three times higher than recent carbon prices on the California market.
Power Planning with Future Costs in Mind
Minnesota and Colorado have both made moves this year involving a social cost of carbon: their states' public utility commissions (PUCs) issued rulings requiring their biggest utility—Xcel Energy—to consider a $43-per-ton social cost of carbon when planning new power plants.
"Whether the commissioners choose to act on it remains to be seen, but at least today they'll have the information," said Erin Overturf, chief energy counsel for the Boulder-based environmental group Western Resource Advocates, one of the petitioners that prompted the Colorado PUC ruling.
Colorado's PUC told Xcel Energy to use $43 per ton of CO2 pollution generated starting in 2022 and to set a schedule for ramping that up to $69 per ton by 2050. The starting figure matches the last estimates from President Barack Obama's Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, which Trump has disbanded.
The figure includes all projected climate damages through the year 2300. It then adjusts them to present values using a 3 percent discount rate—a parameter that spurs much debate among economists. The federal working group used three discount rates: 2.5 percent, 3 percent and 5 percent; higher discount rates afford less current value to future costs, while lower values do the opposite.
Minnesota's PUC followed suit in July. The state has used a social cost of carbon to guide its policies since 1993, but the value was outdated. The July ruling dramatically increased its upper range, from about $4.50 to $43 per ton. Xcel and other utilities will be expected to run cost-benefit studies using both a low-end figure, of just over $9, and the new high-end figure of $43, when assessing new power plant projects in the state.
"I’m not going to build new coal plants in today’s environment," Xcel CEO Ben Fowke said in April. Credit: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Curiously, Xcel Energy appeared to take contradictory positions in the two states. Xcel's environmental policy manager in Minnesota, Nicholas Martin, told its PUC that "bold action is needed" on climate change and that a higher social cost of carbon would empower Xcel to cut carbon emissions "aggressively and affordably."
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Xcel officials went on the offensive against the social cost of carbon, arguing that it would be unduly "burdensome" and that large uncertainties in the federal working group's calculations rendered it unreliable — echoing attacks by conservative think tanks and Republican leaders.
If a social cost of carbon had to be used, Xcel argued, it should include only those climate damages occurring in Colorado or the United States, rather than worldwide. That critique matches changes in federal policy Trump made via his executive order. Federal agencies should set their own social costs of carbon, Trump ordered, but could base them upon harms to the United States only, not the world. Of course, emissions go into the global atmosphere, causing global problems.
During the Colorado proceedings, advocates for climate action and solar power pushed back hard.
"It got pretty heated," Overturf recalled. Only by valuing the impacts of climate change can the PUC consider how power plants in Colorado contribute to it and the harm it may cause to both Coloradans and the state's power system.
"By completely excluding ... externalities, you're really just sticking your head in the sand," she said. "We know that climate change makes our [power] generation fleet less efficient. We know that it causes wildfires and other natural disasters that affect our transmission and distribution system. We know that there are actual costs to utility customers that come from not acting to prevent catastrophic climate change."
Xcel Energy did not make an official available to comment but provided a statement to InsideClimate News saying it already uses a shadow price to "account for the risk of future carbon regulation." It added that Xcel opposed using the social cost of carbon in Colorado because that state's PUC, unlike Minnesota's, is not obligated by state statute to consider externalities such as climate damage.
Tilting the Scale to Cleaner Investments
The social cost of carbon is already having an impact on power choices in Minnesota, and that can only increase with the higher values approved in July, said Leigh Currie, senior staff attorney for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and a leading proponent of Minnesota's social cost of carbon boost.
She cites two examples where the PUC favored cleaner investments—proposed by power project developers or utilities—that cost a little more today but looked more economical when the social cost of carbon was added:
In 2014, the PUC approved a solar project that made headlines as the first head-to-head win for utility-scale solar power without any state subsidies over competing natural gas proposals. Minnesota's PUC picked the 100-megawatt solar project, proposed by Edina, MN-based Geronimo Energy, even though it cost "half a percent" more to build and run than the gas-fired competition. The PUC cited several countervailing factors favoring Geronimo's project, including the social cost of carbon analysis. The resulting Aurora Solar photovoltaic power project, the state's largest, was completed last fall.
Last year, the PUC approved Xcel's proposal to beginning shutting down the state's largest coal-fired power plant early and replacing its generation with a combination of wind, solar and gas-fired power. In the standard cost study, shutting the coal generators appeared to be one of the most expensive options on the table, but the scenario including the social cost of carbon showed it to be the cheapest, Currie said.
Energy consultant and former Maine regulator David Littell, with the nonprofit The Regulatory Assistance Project, estimates that 10 to 20 state PUCs are likely using a social cost of carbon in such planning and procurement decisions, although they may be flying under the radar. He said Maine's PUC used it during his service from 2010 to 2015.
Conscious Markets
Other states are giving the social cost of carbon at least an indirect role in competitive power markets, in which power plants bid to determine how often they run and what they earn for their electricity. Last year, New York and Illinois used the social cost of carbon to design revenue-boosting incentives to keep low-carbon nuclear power running despite stiff competition from cheap gas.
New York is now considering a broader application that would directly affect daily bids on the competitive power market.
New York's concept is to add a fee, based on the social cost of carbon, to bids from coal, gas and diesel-fired power plants. "Generating units that emit carbon would incur a penalty based on their level of carbon emissions and the social cost attributed to carbon," said Brad Jones, CEO of the New York Independent System Operator, in testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Energy last month. "The penalties collected by the NYISO would then be returned to customers in some equitable manner," he said.
Jones said the plan would harmonize NYISO's wholesale markets with the state's clean energy policies, which include goals to have half of the state's power come from renewable sources and cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030.
The idea is popular with economists because it means the prices consumers pay will more closely reflect electricity's full cost, including externalities (rather than just the cost to build and fuel power plants).
The Steel Winds wind farm in Lackawanna, N.Y., was built on the grounds of a former Bethlehem Steel Plant. New York has a goal of getting 50 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030. Credit: John Moore/Getty Images
Littell expects that New York's plan would give an advantage to cleaner resources. Wind and solar farms, nuclear plants, and energy conservation providers should operate more often, he said, and get paid as much as $15 more per megawatt-hour for their resource compared to a power plant burning natural gas. That is a substantial increase from the average $18- to $40-per-megawatt-hour rate that the state's power suppliers earned last year (depending on the region).
John Moore, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Littell said the plan should also have a long-term effect on what types of plants get built, since investors make decisions based largely on the revenue they expect a plant will earn. Moore predicts that it will give a preference to gas plants that cost more to build but that operate more efficiently, and help cleaner options beat even the best gas plants "so that the region doesn't just continue to rely heavily on natural gas."
Using a social cost of carbon could help many more states avoid relying too heavily on gas, Cleetus said. She cited a 2015 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists that found that two-thirds of U.S. states were "putting their electricity consumers at financial risk because of an over-reliance on natural gas." Florida ranked highest, followed by several other southeastern states, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Fighting FERC?
NYISO, the New York state power grid operator released a study of its concept by the Brattle Group, a leading energy consultancy, on Friday. In a joint letter NYISO's CEO Jones and his counterpart at the New York State Department of Public Service announced that they would collaboratively discuss its feasibility with "all stakeholders and market participants."
Other markets could follow. PJM Interconnection, which operates a regional power market in the mid-Atlantic states, has already issued a proposal for integrating a carbon price.
New York has an advantage—since it has its own competitive market, it does not need to negotiate with other states to move forward. However, it will confront inevitable legal challenges from owners of fossil-fueled plants that argue using the social cost of carbon unfairly tilts the market against them.
Moore and others say recent federal court rulings on related challenges have been deferential to states' rights to incentivize attributes of their power supply. But a challenge could also be lodged with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees wholesale electricity and gas markets and whose composition is in flux. The Senate recently approved two Republican Trump appointees to join the panel's incumbent Democrat. (Two more Trump nominees, one from each party, await Senate confirmation.)
What may be critical for New York and other states using the social cost of carbon is how they implement it. Both the federal courts and FERC have favored state interventions in electricity markets when state leaders, including the legislature and governors, rather than power system operators, define the policy and then delegate its implementation. As Moore put it: "The more the state drives the policy, the more likely the courts and FERC are to go along with it."
As for the federal government's use of social cost of carbon? Although Trump killed the inter-agency working group that set values for all agencies to use, the social cost of carbon lives on in Washington as a diminished version of its former self. Trump empowered each federal agency to set its own value, inviting them to ignore climate damage outside the U.S.
That is likely to draw a legal battle since carbon emissions cause global damage, Cleetus said: "Clearly with this administration they're going to attempt to lowball it. That will prompt legal challenges if they're using a low number that doesn't reflect the latest science or their legal obligations."
Meanwhile, Cleetus said, we're losing time. "If we don't take it into account, it doesn't go away. Society still bears that cost in terms of wildfires, or floods or sea level rise. You're just shoving that cost onto Americans at large."
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REGULATION COAL CLEAN ENERGY BUSINESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
CLIMATE CHANGE DONALD TRUMP
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