The John Locke Foundation has signed a letter supporting the federal Transparency and Honesty in Energy Regulations Act of 2017.
THERA halts the use of the fatally flawed and arbitrary “social cost of carbon” (SCC) metric, as well as the related “social cost of methane” (SCM) and “social cost of nitrous oxide,” in agency rulemaking and regulatory action. We applaud your leadership on this issue and urge other Representatives to support this legislation.
The SCC estimate is a product of the Obama administration’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on the Social Cost of Carbon. The problems with this approach are many, but the most important are that these calculations are “wholly arbitrary,” that the IWG refuses to follow OMB’s guidelines for economic analysis, and that the process relies on economic models that are calibrated to follow climate model projections, not actual, real-world observations. The problems are too large to ignore, especially since they are being used to justify regulations that make energy more expensive for American families and businesses.
