Mr./Madam President, today, I rise for the 299th time to alert this somnolent body to the dangers of climate change.
Since President Trump’s inauguration in January, he has embarked upon a series of actions that quite simply defy reality.
On his very first day in office, he issued an executive order declaring that wind energy and solar energy are not energy. This defies even the dictionary, and ignores fact that humans have been harnessing wind and solar power since well before we started combusting fossil fuels.
In March, Trump’s EPA administrator announced his intention to undo the agency’s finding that carbon pollution endangers human health and welfare, despite the fact that the harms and costs associated with climate change become more evident by the day.
In May, Jeff Clark, who runs the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB but is best known for his involvement in Crooked Keystone Cops efforts to overturn the 2020 election, issued a memo directing agencies to stop using the social cost of carbon in agency decision-making. Again, despite the fact that we know that carbon pollution costs the government and the public money. Lots of money.
Now, we hear that Trump’s EPA is readying to rescind a rule limiting carbon pollution from certain fossil fuel-fired power plants on the pretense that the emissions from these plants do not significantly contribute to climate change. Despite the fact that the carbon pollution from fossil fuel-fired U.S. power plants is greater than the carbon pollution from all but six countries in the world.
Put simply, in Trump’s world, facts don’t matter and the truth is whatever his fossil fuel donors say it is.
This would be a sorry enough state of affairs by itself: a president of the United States who ignores facts and lives in an alternate “reality” of a polluting industry’s making.
But it is far worse when others modulate their own worldviews and actions to rely less on facts, on the immutable laws of nature and economics, and more on nonsensical utterances about climate change and energy policy.
Take our Fed Chair, Jerome Powell. Despite admitting to Sen. Tina Smith on the Senate Banking Committee in February that climate change would make it impossible to get insurance (and therefore a mortgage) in certain coastal and wildfire-exposed regions of the country, he’s fallen into line behind the Trumpian denialism.
Three days before Trump’s inauguration, he pulled the Fed out of an international network of central banks that researches climate-related financial and economic risks. The European Central Bank and the central banks of China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the U.K., and more than 80 other countries are members. But not us. Not anymore.
Then in May, the Fed pressured an international banking supervision organization to disband a task force overseeing climate risk. Thankfully, the other central banks refused.
Last, the Fed dissolved its own climate risk working groups. Can’t have those anymore, not when our polluter-funded Dear Leader says it’s all a hox.
Or take Daniel Yergin, Peter Orzag, and Atul Arya – three people who should know better. They waited barely a month after Trump’s inauguration before publishing a 5000-word manifesto in Foreign Affairs in defense of what they call energy pragmatism.
What is “energy pragmatism,” you might ask. Basically, it’s a Trump-friendly and factually challenged theory that transitioning to green energy is too complicated and expensive, so we may as well resolve ourselves to using fossil fuels for a long, long time to come. Despite its length, and its inclusion of a section entitled “It’s The Economy,” the piece doesn’t ever mention the massive costs and systemic economic risks already looming from climate change.
Which brings me back to Jeff Clark and the social cost of carbon.
There was a time when Republicans were the great champions of cost-benefit analysis. Ronald Reagan was the first to mandate its use in the regulatory process.
While far from perfect, it makes sense to have a monetary estimate of the costs and benefits associated with a particular agency action. And that’s the social cost of carbon. It calculates the climate-related costs from adding an additional ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Or the benefits from eliminating a ton of carbon pollution.
The social cost of carbon is not a new concept. Economists have been using it for decades.
Yet Clark’s memo argues that the social cost of carbon shouldn’t be used because a monetized estimate of the costs of one ton of carbon pollution is too uncertain.
Well, first off, we know the cost isn’t zero. Our own lived experiences teach us that.
Second, we know it isn’t even close to zero. Every serious academic estimate of the social cost of carbon is well north of $50, with most well over $100 per ton. EPA’s estimate, informed by copious academic research, was $190 per ton.
The IMF calculates a subsidy to fossil fuel in the U.S. every year of $700B, from the pollute-for-free business model. You can back calculate from there an effective cost of carbon pollution of around $110 per ton. This was hardly the highest estimate out there – there are many credible estimates in the hundreds of dollars per ton.
Much of the variation stems from the choice of what damage you attempt to quantify. For example, EPA’s estimate only looked at four harms – increased mortality, damage to agriculture, increased energy costs, and damage from sea level rise. It did not consider the systemic financial and economic risks from climate change of the sort that I’ve discussed frequently in this body and to which Fed Chair Powell alluded when he admitted that climate change would render parts of the country uninsurable and unmortgageable.
In other words, almost all estimates of the social cost of carbon are underestimates, because they do not attempt to quantify all climate-related costs and damages.
But Jeff Clark wants us to ignore all this. The logic is stunning – because it’s not clear what number is right, we’ll use a number we know is wrong.
Let’s be clear: this is another oily thumb on the scale to help big polluters. Climate pollution is a global problem. Our emissions harm Americans, and the rest of the world. Chinese emissions harm the Chinese, and the rest of the world. And harms that occur to people in other countries have real costs here at home as well.
Take the Syrian civil war, which destabilized the Middle East and led to periodic American military interventions. A long-term severe drought, exacerbated by climate change, played a role in that conflict.
Look at nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, which have been at odds for decades. As glaciers shrink in the Himalayas due to climate change, water will eventually become more scarce, raising tensions as these adversaries compete for a dwindling supply.
Then there are the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which have been hit hard by a drought made worse by climate change. The drought made it harder for subsistence farmers to eke out a living, and contributed to the surge in migration to the U.S.
Faraway events have an economic effect here at home. A drought in Panama lowers water in the Panama Canal and makes shipping more expensive. A drought or flood hitting a major agricultural exporter makes food here more expensive. A flood in Thailand provokes a shortage in car parts. The global economy is interconnected; climate-related droughts, floods, fires, and storms in foreign lands impose costs on us here at home.
The legions of bootlickers who orbit around Trump remind me of the legend about King Canute.
King Canute, like President Trump today, was surrounded by hordes of flattering courtiers. Unlike President Trump, King Canute was displeased by his courtiers’ unceasing flattery that he was all-powerful. So in order to teach them a lesson, he set his throne by the sea and commanded the incoming tide to halt so as not to wet his feet. The tide, of course, took no mind of the king’s words and continued its advance. When the waters washed over his feet, King Canute exclaimed, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”
Words that should particularly resonate today.
Climate change is real. It is driven by the eternal laws of chemistry and physics, and a latter-day ersatz “king” saying otherwise is of no import.
Climate change is going to be very expensive, very disruptive, and very damaging.
Renewable energy and low carbon technologies are already cheap and getting cheaper. Whoever dominates them will dominate the 21st century. Let’s make sure it’s us.
