Some 400 scientists and climate experts showed their support on Monday for the US government’s proposal to revise the key indicator that estimates the damage of carbon dioxide emissions.
This is a number that addresses the social cost of carbon and represents in dollars the value of damages from climate change for each metric ton of carbon dioxide.
With this indicator, the negative consequences of CO2 emissions are evaluated at an economic, labor and health level and includes the difference in costs of the emissions that they reduce and also the damages that are prevented by reducing them.
In the United States, that number has been an indicator for cost-benefit analysis in many areas for years.
The value considers future illnesses and deaths from heat waves, microparticle pollution, worsening natural disasters, property damage, predictable violent conflict, and mass migration, among others.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed in a November draft to increase the estimate of damage caused by one ton of CO2 from the current $51 to $190.
This Monday, when the term for comments on the proposal closed, the Union of Conscious Scientists (USC) supported the initiative with a letter signed by around 400 climate experts.
“The devastating and costly impacts of the climate crisis are evident all around us,” they said.
“The science is clear that these impacts will only worsen as global warming increases. The estimate does not include, for example, some hard-to-quantify costs such as a ‘range of ecosystem impacts and loss of cultural heritage,'” they explained.
Now that the public comment period is over, EPA will launch an external peer review of the estimates before finalizing it.
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