This June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to announce its request for public input on whether and how to change the way it considers costs and benefits in making regulatory decisions. Of particular interest to EPA and the public is the figure known as the social cost of carbon (SCC). The SCC is the estimated marginal external cost of a unit emission of carbon dioxide, based upon the future damages (such as reduced agricultural productivity, increased flood damage, or worsened health and mortality) that that unit will inflict through its contribution to the greenhouse effect and the global warming that results. The metric, trenchantly described by Obama economic advisor Michael Greenstone as the "the most important number you've never heard of," is the lynchpin of myriad climate-related regulations and carbon tax proposals. Given the Supreme Court's 2007 directive to EPA to evaluate carbon dioxide and EPA's subsequent finding that it qualifies as a pollutant, calculations of the SCC will have far-reaching consequences. As a point of entry to the stark disagreements on the topic, compare the Trump administration's current estimate of the SCC of $5 per ton to its predecessor's estimate of over $40. What with the United States' annual carbon dioxide outputof around 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, incorporating one estimate instead of the other into the calculation of a regulatory proposal's costs and benefits all but determines the likelihood of the proposal's adoption.

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