For years the federal government, especially its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has sought to use “social cost of carbon” (SCC) as justification, at the cost of billions of dollars, for regulations making it more difficult to drill for and use fossil fuels. That practice can continue—for now.

On May 26, the Supreme Court declined a request from 11 states to block the Biden Administration from using the estimated SCC in regulatory activities. The states had argued that the modeling to calculate SCC is unreliable and, by considering only negative impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and ignoring the positive impacts both of the emissions and of the energy use that generates them, improperly concludes that SCC is necessarily negative and severe.

Previously, a district judge granted a stay prohibiting use of SCC for regulatory decisions pending full trial. An appeals court lifted the stay. The Supreme Court’s declining the states’ request to reinstate the stay is not the end of the case. The 11 states, with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry as lead counsel, now will argue their case before Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana.

Myron Ebell, Director of the Center for Energy & Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, informed me by email that Cain is likely to rule in favor of the states. The federal government will then likely appeal, and, according to Ebell, there’s a good chance the states will prevail at that level. In that case, the federal Department of Justice would likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

Ebell says there are five possible paths and outcomes:

• The Supreme Court could refuse to hear the appeal.
• The states could win.
• The states could lose.
• President Biden’s Department of Justice could decide not to run the risk of losing on appeal.
• A new administration (if it doesn’t come before the Supreme Court before then) could agree with the verdict and thus not appeal.

Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill told The Epoch Times in an email: “The Administration’s efforts to reorder the American economy using these made-up metrics underscores the truth of the one economist’s statement that this is ‘the most important number you never heard of.’ We are disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision to not vacate the stay, but we are confident that we will be successful in reinstating the injunction after this matter is heard on the merits at the 5th Circuit. Briefing is underway. In the meantime, we will continue to flag the government’s use of these numbers.”

Heritage Foundation Chief Statistician, Data Analyst, and Senior Research Fellow explains why SCC is an unreliable calculation here. Along with Ross McKitrick, Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Guelph, and David Kreutzer, then (2017) with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, published a peer-reviewed article in Climate Change Economics demonstrating that the SCC is much lower than claimed in the models on which the federal government depends and could actually be negative—that is, CO2 emissions could do more good than harm.

Photo by Adam Szuscik on Unsplash.