Why The EPA’s “Social Cost of Carbon” Fails

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is supposed to be “An estimate of the economic damages associated with a small increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, in a given year”. However, the EPA’s “analysis” of the “social cost of carbon,” developed recently as justification for a rule constraining energy use by microwave ovens, ignores the fact that U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases are about 17 percent of the world total. Therefore, even an immediate reduction by half in U.S. emissions would yield a reduction in world temperatures of about one-tenth of one degree by… [more]