Government decisionmakers and businesses now have to grapple with the costs of climate change.
to a bedrock federal environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act which had been narrowed under former President Donald Trump. The standard will require new infrastructure projects to more broadly consider how they alter the environment, especially when they are planned near already polluted communities.
That recently revived rule is one of several recent White House policies to address climate change by pressing federal and corporate decisionmakers to fully reckon with the costs of an overheated planet.The price of climate change is hard to fathom—financial consulting firm Deloitte predicts that the US stands to lose $14.5 trillion over 50 years if the planet warms by 3°C degrees Celsius—but policymakers have been slow to simply incorporate any of those risks into cost-benefit analyses.
The new rule will also require analyses to consider “cumulative effects” on communities. In practice, this means that projects in places already exposed to air and water pollution may face more careful scrutiny—The New York Times , White House officials say that the Biden administration has already weighed these climate effects in its environmental analyses, so not much would change in the near future. But the rule—if it survives almost inevitable legal challenges—would create a consistent process for future administrations to track the environmental impact of federal projects.
That price of carbon is used in cost-benefit analyses, which may happen alongside or outside of a NEPA review to approve federal projects and policies. Decisions that increase carbon emissions will be judged as having higher financial costs, and are therefore less likely to move forward.
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