Abstract: As climate change continues to manifest itself through ever more extreme weather phenomena, regulatory and legislative frameworks require methods of precisely estimating these damages to weigh against other factors in policy design. The social cost of carbon (SCC) is the most frequently cited such method, used to convert market (e.g. property damage) and nonmarket (e.g. health effects) climate damages into a single dollar value. But research shows that due to longstanding socioeconomic inequities, Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to climate risk, a fact that is not taken into account by SCC calculations. Given the ubiquity of the SCC throughout US federal policymaking, its lack of racial analysis is a concerning sign that the framing of climate policy may be undermining environmental justice efforts. The SCC has been critiqued and analyzed from a variety of angles, but these have tended to focus on income inequities on the international scale. Using an established climate vulnerability index and demographic data from the US Census, I show that climate damages are, in fact, unequally distributed on a racial basis. I argue that we must reform the SCC if we are to continue using it, while also questioning the SCC framework itself, suggesting we may be better off entirely reimagining how we determine the cost of climate change.
Speaker
Brady Dye