Fourth District Democrat A. Donald McEachin and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet are calling on the Biden administration to reinstate a science-based process to evaluate and apply the cost of climate change in government decision-making.
In 2017, President Trump issued an executive order disbanding an important interagency working group charged with formulating the cost of carbon pollution and withdrew the guidance the working group had issued. Instead, the Trump administration made changes, detailed in a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, that resulted in a severe downtick in the value the administration attributed to the cost of carbon pollution.
“Properly accounting for the cost of greenhouse gas pollution is an important step in getting our country on track to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” McEachin and Bennet wrote in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden. “[W]e urge that you promptly reinstate a rigorous interagency process to restore science-based application of the social cost of greenhouse gases and, in particular, to prepare updated values for consistent government-wide use.”
McEachin and Bennet are the lead sponsors of the Carbon Pollution Transparency Act, which would ensure the federal government implements a science-based process to account for the cost of carbon pollution.
The bill is supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, participants of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee, and a coalition of experts and state and local officials in Colorado.
The text of the letter is available here
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