New Study Finds Incredibly High Carbon Pollution Costs -- Especially For the US and India (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study led by UC San Diego's Katharine Ricke published in Nature Climate Change found that not only is the global social cost of carbon dramatically higher than the federal estimate ($37 per ton) -- probably between $177 and $805 per ton, most likely $417 -- but that the cost to America is around $50 per ton. That's the second-highest in the world behind India's $90, and is also higher than the current federal estimate for the global social cost of carbon. That's a remarkable conclusion worth repeating. Ricke's team found that the cost of carbon pollution to just the United States is probably higher than its government's current estimate of costs to the entire world. And the actual global cost is more than 10 times higher than the federal estimate.

[The Guardian's Dana Nuccitelli] asked Ricke to describe her team's approach in this study: To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?

The team answered these questions using four "modules": a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.

That study detailed the relationship between a country's average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13C (55F). That's the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures. The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3-5C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe's.

Comments

I don't pay those costs at the pump

[rsilvergun]

and I still need gas to get to work. Would I like a public transportation system? You bet. Am I going to get one with the level of corruption in my country? Hell no.

What's frustrating is the folks demanding a "free market" solution to the problem. Maybe there will be one like there was for getting lead out of gas. After decades and decades of damage done to people's health and well being (and if crime statistics are to be believed our entire nation). What I'm saying is the free market is _slow_. I'll be dead before it fixes things. Probably from Lung cancer.

Re:I don't pay those costs at the pump

[El Cubano]

... with the level of corruption in my country? Hell no.

What's frustrating is the folks demanding a "free market" solution to the problem.

As you point out, there are times the free market can be slow. However, absent some external distortion (e.g., the tax code, monopoly, burdensome/unfair regulation, etc.) the free market is by far the most effective and efficient (from a utilization of capital perspective) way to achieve an optimal solution.

In the same way that the scientific method is inherently unbiased, the free market is inherently free of corruption. Now, since people manage to bias the scientific method, you can bet that they also manage to corrupt the free market. But the equilibrium of the system tends away from that, unlike government which tends toward an equilibrium of corruption.

Re:I don't pay those costs at the pump

[religionofpeas]

the free market is inherently free of corruption

If you don't control the free market, you get concentration of power. If you do control the free market, you get corruption.

Re:Cause.. Meet effect.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are making so many cause and effect assumptions here it is just mind-blowing..

1. The Earth is warming.
2. We are probably the major cause.
3. Our actions are certainly the only knob we can control.
4. It is reckless to change how the only life supporting planet you got works, particularly if you have no viable plan to undo the mess once it gets too far.
5. At minimum we need to compute the cost of action vs the cost of inaction to society, which seems to be what the study does.

So tax it!

[Gravis Zero]

Look, I know we've built our societies on CO2 belching cars and CO2 diarrhetic energy production but it's a real problem that we need to fix. We have the technology to build carbon capture systems remove CO2 from the air with 1000x the efficacy of trees (per square meter) but it needs to be built and maintained. Therefore it seems only logical that there be a tax on all the things that produce CO2 so that money can be used to capture it. Obviously, this will make lower and non-polluting products far more attractive as they will be cheaper.

The solution is known and it's extremely frustrating that there is a total lack of will to implement it.

Re:So tax it!

[DigiShaman]

All schemes involving cap and trade / carbon tax, etc is nothing more than a wealth redistribution scheme for the globalists to maintain a neo-feudalism form of global dominance, control, and oppression.

If you really wanted to tackle CO2, then dump every bit of R&D into Fusion Energy. NEVER will happen though as it negates the the real purpose as I've just stated above.

Re:So tax it!

[DNS-and-BIND]

And the solution is always: exterminate capitalism immediately, implement worldwide socialism, the United States must pay the staggering cost of the whole thing by impoverishing its people, and we need global governance without any voting or input from the deplorables. The whole thing might be more believable if the "solution" wasn't always the same thing.

Re:Cause.. Meet effect.

[Ichijo]

Ask a farmer if temperatures affect yield.

Correlation != causation

[bluegutang]

Yes, warm countries are on average less economically successful. That doesn't imply that warming will make a country less successful.

Singapore is right in the tropics, sweltering year round, and is extremely successful. So is Hong Kong, which has only a slightly more tolerable climate. So is Israel, which is in a desert region. In the US, ever since the invention of air conditioning it's been the warm areas, not the cool ones, which have the most economic growth. In both the US and China, the cold regions currently form a stagnating "rust belt".

The reasons why, in other places, economic growth is inversely correlated with temperature, are probably due to history and culture, factors that won't suddenly change if a place warms up.

Re:US CO2 emissions are strongly down

[religionofpeas]

US NUMBERS FOR CO2 HAVE BEEN FALLING FOR MANY YEARS!!!!!!

When do you expect them to hit zero, with things going they way they are ?

Keep in mind that natural gas replacing coal is just a one time picking of low hanging fruit.

Nuclear Power

[blindseer]

If global warming from CO2 production is a problem then we need to consider all solutions to reduce CO2 production. As it is right now, today, nuclear power produced the least CO2 for the most energy. As it is right now nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have.
Cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...

Anyone that both desires to reduce CO2 immediately and ban the future development of nuclear power is placing us all into an impossible situation. It's possible to both reduce CO2 and not use nuclear power but that means (as shown by the source I linked to above) much more mining of ores for the production of steel, concrete, glass, copper, aluminum, and so many more raw materials. This comes with costs, in money, lives, and standard of living.

Any problems with nuclear power is local, very local, as in limited to the borders of the power plant and the mines. Releases of material beyond these borders are rare, minute, and can be addressed. Issues of CO2 spreading will be global in nature. Any costs of nuclear power must be balanced with the reduced costs of CO2 output it would produce in replacing coal and natural gas.

Wind and solar involve considerable material costs, far more than nuclear. They also have costs in lives from industrial accidents, far less than any from nuclear power per energy produced. Wind and solar are also unreliable and expensive, which when addressing the unreliability means increasing the costs. There may be places where wind and solar are really cheap, and where pumped hydro storage is also cheap, but these places are rare. Suitable sites for nuclear power, especially fourth generation nuclear, are not rare.

I do not believe global warming to be a problem but I will concede that point if it means we get cheap, reliable, and safe nuclear power.

Re:Nuclear Power

[blindseer]

wow you seem to be ignoring the extend and harm of a few nuclear plant disasters in the past few decades. problems not local at all, cross many countries.

You appear to assume new nuclear reactors would be built the same as those that created these disasters. Estimates of the deaths from Chernobyl has been reduced considerably, to the point that even if we continued to build nuclear power like we did in the 1970s we'd still see nuclear power as safer than anything else by orders of magnitude. Fukushima was built before Chernobyl, and had design problems that were left uncorrected even though they were known about for decades. No one will build a nuclear power plant like either of those again, if only because new designs are cheaper while also being safer.

I am not ignoring the extent of the harm, only recognizing that this harm was temporary and we keep these exclusion zones only out of an abundance of caution that many measures show are unnecessary. Again, such concerns are not relevant to modern nuclear power because no one is proposing to build nuclear reactors like those at Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island again. Those were all second generation designs, and all had problems of needing power to put in a safe condition. Third generation designs do not need power to be rendered safe. Fourth generation designs are being tested now and will likely be in demonstration prototypes in less than 10 years, and in production in 5 years after that.

really solar and energy storage tech has become efficient enough we should go that route, we don't need nuclear any more

You think storage will make solar power competitive? Batteries don't care where the energy comes from. We can charge them up with nuclear power. Those batteries would serve nuclear power well for load following, backup power, maintaining grid stability, and perhaps more.

If we can agree that CO2 is a problem then we need nuclear power. That's because nuclear power provides power with a lower CO2 footprint than solar. It also means less environmental impact from mining, land covered, and lives lost. Solar power is also quite expensive compared to nuclear, even today and nuclear power keeps getting cheaper with each generation of development. Any complaints of nuclear power being expensive now are matters of politics, not technology. We can fix policy, and at a low cost. Solar power is inherently unreliable, because the sun goes down, and inherently expensive, because of the resources required. Technology might fix the problems with solar power in the future but today nuclear power is more reliable, lower cost, safer, and lower CO2.

while I'm not anti-nuclear let's not sugar coat the truth

If you continue to repeat such lies, as well as claim we don't need nuclear power, then you are demonstrably anti-nuclear power. How can you both say we don't need nuclear power and claim to be not anti-nuclear? Do you not see the contradiction here?

Let's not "sugar coat the truth", nuclear power has a lower CO2 output per energy produced. If we agree that CO2 output is a problem then we need energy from the lowest CO2 energy source, and that's nuclear power.