The U.S. government’s ability to weigh the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions in federal rulemaking—and with it the potential resumption of delayed leasing for oil and gas drilling on public lands—has been restored, following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s March 16 stay of a lower court injunction that barred the Biden administration from using its social cost estimates in policy and rulemaking.
The social cost of carbon quantifies the climate impacts caused by each emitted ton of carbon dioxide. It, along with the social cost of methane and of nitrous oxide, have been used by the government to run cost-benefit analyses for policy and project level decisions, such as permitting energy projects.
