{"id":42710,"date":"2025-05-25T13:48:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T18:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=42710"},"modified":"2025-05-25T22:49:46","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T03:49:46","slug":"trumps-magical-thinking-on-climate-change-is-just-political-smoke-and-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=42710","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s magical thinking on climate change is just political smoke and mirrors\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Washington often indulges in magical thinking, as politicians conjure new budgetary gimmicks or announce ambitious goals without concrete plans to achieve them. The Trump administration\u2019s latest hocus-pocus comes via a memo<\/u><\/a> that effectively abandons the long-standing metric that quantifies the economic damages of climate change, known as the social cost of greenhouse gases<\/u><\/a> (estimated in 2023 at about $210 per ton<\/u><\/a> of carbon dioxide). With this memo, the administration is telling federal agencies to assume that the costs from climate change will be $0 when weighing policy decisions.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The social cost of greenhouse gases is not a perfect crystal ball. But it\u2019s the best tool<\/u><\/a> we have to ensure that when the government makes decisions about energy, infrastructure and environmental protection, the long-term economic consequences of climate change are part of the conversation. It was developed through decades of work by experts across multiple administrations in a rigorously peer-reviewed<\/u><\/a> and transparent process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The White House\u2019s grand rationale for setting this value to zero is that the issue is just too \u201cuncertain.\u201d That isn\u2019t a good-faith argument; it\u2019s a flat refusal to confront the real-world costs of climate pollution.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we applied this \u201ctoo uncertain\u201d sleight of hand across the board, both the government and the economy would grind to a halt. Should we defund national security operations because the nature of future threats is \u201cuncertain\u201d? Should we stop estimating Medicare costs because long-run healthcare expenditures are \u201cuncertain\u201d? Should people and businesses stop buying property insurance because accidents only occur sporadically?   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serious policy decisions require using the best available estimates in the face of uncertainty, understanding that imperfect information is much better than none. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit<\/u><\/a> recognized two decades ago, government \u201cby nature work[s] under conditions of serious uncertainty, and regulation would be at an end if uncertainty alone were an excuse to ignore a congressional command.\u201d Instead, an \u201cagency\u2019s job is to exercise its expertise to make tough choices about which of the competing estimates is most plausible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet when it comes to the economic costs of climate change, this administration wants to fool us into believing that \u201cuncertain\u201d effects are illusory and, therefore, ignorable. To the contrary, despite a degree of uncertainty, the costs of climate change are real, quantifiable and staggering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This recent memo, signed by the White House office responsible for reviewing regulatory analyses, tells agencies they \u201cshould not monetize the impacts\u201d from greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their rollbacks of environmental protections. The memo deploys every trick in the book to try to obscure reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It starts by attempting a vanishing act, doubting \u201cwhether \u2026 any supposed changes in the climate are actually occurring,\u201d despite the well-settled scientific consensus that human-made climate change is \u201cunequivocally\u201d real<\/u><\/a>. Next, a rope-cutting trick clumsily tries to sever the established links of \u201cclimate-economic interactions.\u201d In fact, 89 percent of economists believe<\/u><\/a> climate change is already negatively impacting the global economy, or soon will.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then comes some classic misdirection, questioning \u201chow to account for technological advancements that may \u2026 facilitate human adaptation\u201d to climate change \u2014 even though adaptation and technological development are already accounted for<\/u><\/a> in existing estimates<\/u><\/a> of the social cost of greenhouse gases.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For its final act, the memo attempts some pick-a-card trickery, fanning out a range of socioeconomic scenarios and \u201cdiscount rates\u201d and implying that, no matter which selections are made, some uncertainty will exist. Fair enough: any projection involves a degree of uncertainty. But the models used to value the social cost of greenhouse gases explicitly analyze<\/u><\/a> and account for such uncertainty in multiple ways<\/u><\/a>. The approach was based on hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve seen these tricks before, and they fell just as flat back then.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2007, under President George W. Bush, the Department of Transportation claimed that the benefits of cutting carbon emissions (by, for example, increasing cars\u2019 fuel-efficiency) were too uncertain to value. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that failing to value the emissions was the same as assigning a value of \u201czero,\u201d and that while a \u201crange of values\u201d could be plausible, the benefits were \u201ccertainly not zero<\/u><\/a>.\u201d Following that ruling, federal agencies began estimating the social cost of greenhouse gases, and have used non-zero values for nearly two decades<\/u><\/a> \u2014 until now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration is trying to pull that same old rabbit out of a hat to conceal the real costs of environmental deregulation and make \u201cbarriers<\/u><\/a>\u201d to drilling, mining and pollution disappear. We shouldn\u2019t buy into this stale illusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The memo feigns concern about imprecise numbers but attributes the least believable number of all \u2014 zero \u2014 to the substantial damages caused by each ton of climate pollution. The administration wants to wave a wand, recite the spell of \u201cuncertainty\u201d and make us believe that all future damages from ravaged coastlines, extreme weather and devastated ecosystems are, economically speaking, costless.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony is that leading economists<\/u><\/a> argue that uncertainty makes the true social cost of greenhouse gases higher than our current cautious estimates, not lower. Climate change could trigger catastrophic, irreversible tipping points, but current estimates<\/u><\/a> of the metric do not fully capture society\u2019s rational aversion to such risks. Uncertainty strongly suggests we should be erring on the side of more aggressive action, not discarding the primary metric that tries to quantify the risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ignoring the costs of climate change won\u2019t make them magically disappear; it only guarantees they\u2019ll be even higher for the next generation. The Trump administration needs to ditch the magical thinking, face reality and get serious about the costs of climate change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington often indulges in magical thinking, as politicians conjure new budgetary gimmicks or announce ambitious goals without concrete plans to achieve them. The Trump administration\u2019s latest hocus-pocus comes via a memo that effectively abandons the long-standing metric that quantifies the economic damages of climate change, known as the social cost of greenhouse gases (estimated in 2023 at about $210 per […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":42711,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4148,2891,1230],"class_list":["post-42710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-climate-change","tag-politics","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42712,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42710\/revisions\/42712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}