Big biz fights Obama admin’s calculations on carbon costs

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http://grist.org/news/big-biz-fights-obama-admins-calculations-on-carbon-costs/

Big business doesn’t like the way the Obama administration tallies the costs of carbon pollution. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, and other industry groups are fighting the federal government’s latest “social cost of carbon” calculations.

The social cost of carbon is an attempt to quantify the climate-related costs of fossil-fuel burning — costs associated with floods, falling farmland productivity, and climate-related illnesses. The social cost of carbon was raised by the Obama administration in May, from $23.80 per ton to $38.

The change would help justify federal policies that more aggressively rein in carbon pollution. And that’s not something that groups representing America’s biggest and dirtiest companies want.

“The SCC [social cost of carbon] estimates are the product of an opaque process and any pretensions to their supposed accuracy (and therefore usefulness in policy making) are unsupportable,” the groups wrote in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, petitioning it to abandon the recent calculations.

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1. This is why putting dollar signs on the environment doesn't work

It just increases the incentive for plutocrats to tighten their hold on government. You end up with valuations that are capricious at best, and it puts prices created by manufactured desire on the same footing as the needs of wildlife.

Sin taxes are better because they are explicitly intended to have a cost proportional to the polluters' ability to pay. Plus they don't create the suggestion that nature is some kind of warehouse filled with inventory.