On August 8 the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied petitions to review the Department of Energy's final rules pertaining to energy efficiency standards in commercial refrigeration equipment. The petitioners (a small business and two trade associations) had levied objections against both the process and the outcome of DOE's rulemaking. The court denied the petitions and ruled that DOE's use of the "social cost of carbon" as a tool in federal cost/benefit analysis was neither "arbitrary nor capricious."
Now we at IER have been writing for years about the dubious "social cost of carbon"; for example you can read our in-depth Comment submitted to the Office of Management and Budget. Over the next few weeks, we will have many things to say about the recent court ruling.
However, in the present article I want to keep things simple and focus on a Bloomberg reaction written by Cass Sunstein, who was overjoyed at the court ruling. I will demonstrate to any open-minded reader that the American public has indeed been grossly misled on the issue of a carbon tax...and I will use nothing but Sunstein's own statements. If even a huge fan of the court ruling unwittingly shows just how outrageous it was, then that is a slam dunk in the case against the "social cost of carbon" as a guide to federal policy.
