Back in January, Biden signed an executive order that tasked a working group with determining a social cost of carbon (SCC) — a measure, in dollars, of how much economic damage results from emitting 1 ton of carbon dioxide. For now, the working group decided to go with $51 per ton, the same SCC the Obama administration used, until it can study the matter in depth and release its final determination early next year.

Being able to discuss the damage in terms of a precise dollar amount is important because it allows scientists and policymakers to show when the benefits of averting global warming are greater than the costs. At some point it just becomes cheaper to switch to sustainable systems rather than coping with all the wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves that result from unsustainable systems.

Although the Obama administration had set the SCC at $51 per ton, the Trump administration put it as low as $1, in part because of a decision to factor in only domestic, not global, impacts of emissions.

Compared to $1, the $51 price tag the Biden administration reverted to is high — and the coalitions of red states that have brought lawsuits against Biden, one in Missouri and another in Louisiana, are not happy with it.

But according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than that price tag suggests.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until now, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.

Read the full article about social cost of carbon by Sigal Samuel at Vox.