The Biden administration is unleashing a powerful regulatory tool aimed at climate

The Biden administration’s crackdown on methane leaks from oil wells is based in part on a powerful new policy tool that could strengthen its legal authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the economy — including those from cars, power plants, factories and oil refineries .

New limits on methane, announced Saturday by the Environmental Protection Agency at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, target just one source of climate change pollution. Methane, which is released from oil and gas drilling sites, is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere in the short term.

But within the language of the methane rule, EPA economists have tucked away a controversial calculation that would give the government the legal authority to aggressively limit climate-warming pollution from nearly every smokestack and tailpipe across the country.

This figure, known as the “social cost of carbon,” has been used since the Obama administration to calculate the damage to the economy caused by one ton of CO2 pollution. The metric is used to weigh the economic benefits and costs of regulations that apply to polluting industries, such as transportation and energy.

As scientists become increasingly able to link global warming to wildfires, floods, droughts, storms and heat waves, estimates of the social cost of carbon have become increasingly sophisticated.

The higher the number, the greater the government’s justification for forcing polluters to reduce emissions that are dangerously warming the planet. During the Obama administration, White House economists calculated the social cost of carbon at $42 per ton. The Trump administration lowered it to less than $5 per ton. Under President Biden, costs were brought back to Obama levels, adjusted for inflation and set at $51.

The new estimate of the social cost of carbon, making its debut in a legally binding federal regulation, is almost four times that amount: $190 per ton.

EPA officials say they plan to use this figure in all future climate regulations from the agency.

“This is a huge win – this is great. It’s great!” said Michael Greenstone, the Obama administration economist who first came up with the idea of ​​using the social cost of carbon to create an economic justification for climate policy.

“It brings the U.S. government to the frontier of climate science and economics after we have fallen behind,” said Mr. Greenstone, who now heads the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “And it means that it will be justified to have stricter climate rules. This means that polluting power stations and cars will be able to emit less.”

The new number will go into effect immediately: The EPA plans to issue final regulations this spring to reduce carbon dioxide from cars, trucks and power plants. Couple the new number with the agency’s proposal to tighten tailpipe emissions by increasing sales of electric vehicles or with its proposal to eliminate pollution from power plants, and the economic benefits of each rule could increase to more than $1 trillion, far greater than the estimated cost to affected industries. It would be similar to new rules to curb pollution from steel and cement plants, factories and oil refineries, which Mr. Biden plans to do if he is re-elected to a second term.

“With such a high number, many more actions to combat climate change will pass the cost-benefit test,” said Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

That’s a crucial point in the legal battle over regulations: Historically, when the government can show that the economic benefit of a regulation outweighs its costs, the courts are likely to uphold those rules despite legal challenges.

“This number means that the government has a weapon it can use to justify whatever it wants to do,” Elizabeth MurrillLouisiana’s Republican attorney general said in an interview.

Ms. Murrill is part of a group of Republican attorneys general preparing to battle the Biden administration’s climate regulations, which they see as an administration attack on the industry.

A federal judge had rejected one challenge to the Biden administration’s decision to set the cost of carbon pollution at $51 per ton. Ms Murrill said the new number should be easier to attack in court because it would have much greater economic impact.

“Now we have a concrete application of the numbers and now we can go back and challenge everything again,” she said.

EPA officials said they are prepared for any legal challenge. They spent more than two years working on a 182-page analysis documenting the scientific and economic methods they used to map the damage to livelihoods, property values ​​and commodity costs caused by climate change .

“It’s a big problem, and it reflects the impacts of climate change that people are dealing with every day,” Vicki Arroyo, EPA’s policy officer, said in an interview.

“If you look at the recent National Climate Assessment, these numbers reflect what the scientific community has been saying about the costs of climate change to society,” Ms. Arroyo said, pointing to the publication last month of a sweeping report documenting the impact of climate change . on American lives, from increasing fatalities during extreme heat in the Southwest, earlier and longer pollen seasons in Texas, northward migration of pests in the Corn Belt, and even more damaging hailstorms in Wyoming and Nebraska.

The review includes a chapter on economics, which reflects a growing field of research into the financial costs of a warming planet and how they impact households, businesses and markets.

Researchers for the National Academies of Science Completed 2017 that the Obama-era estimate that every ton of carbon pollution results in $42 in damage to the economy was outdated, and recommended that the administration revise this figure. A study last year in the journal Nature concluded that the price should be $185 per tonne.

Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, could try to cut the cost of carbon emissions if he wins the White House, as he did when he slashed the Obama-era number.

But Mandy Gunasekara, EPA chief of staff in the Trump administration, said that given the research and analysis behind the new number, it could be difficult for a new administration to easily reduce it.

“There is a high degree of legal certainty” given the inclusion of this number in the new methane regulation, said Ms. Gunasekara, who is now a visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization that is writing the blueprint for the next Republican Party. government’s energy and climate agenda.

Still, a future Republican administration will likely try, she said.