Carbon pollution — the main source of global warming — doesn’t cause only long-term damage. It also affects life today.
| NYTIMES |
| Carbon emissions cause lung diseases that kill thousands of people a year. The emissions also reduce worker productivity. And the storms and droughts associated with climate change destroy houses, offices, roads and farmland. |
| Add up all of these effects, which scientists and economists have done, and each ton of carbon dioxide costs society about $36. If anything, this number is conservative, because it was calculated before recent evidence of the accelerated effects of climate change. |
| Whatever its imperfections, an estimate like this is important, because it can help government officials decide which environmental regulations make sense — and which would do more harm than good. The number allows for cost-benefit analysis, a staple of serious economic thinking. Conservatives, in fact, have generally been fans of cost-benefit analysis because they see it as a way to ground naive liberal thinking in reality. |
| Which is why the attitudes that some Trump transition officials have toward cost-benefit analysis is so disturbing. |
| Two leaked documents from the transition suggest that a Trump administration — presumably acting on behalf of energy companies— may scrap cost-benefit analysis of pollution and simply act as if pollution were harmless. |
| “If that happens,” Michael Greenstone and Cass Sunstein write in an Op-Ed today, “it will defy law, science and economics.” Greenstone, of the University of Chicago, and Sunstein, of Harvard, helped design the government’s current approach to cost-benefit analysis. |
| Economists like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch: Nearly every choice brings downsides, trade-offs and costs, even if those costs are obscured. |
| There is certainly no such thing as free pollution, no matter what polluters may try to claim. |
| The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including my old boss Bill Keller, who was a great executive editor of The Times, on the prospects for criminal-justice reform. |
| David Leonhardt Op-Ed Columnist |
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