The Social Cost of Carbon figures were all wildly wrong: One recalculation wipes half the cost or more.

By Jo Nova

Nearly every plea for carbon subsidies depends on “the Social Cost of Carbon”, and it’s wrong

Every ton of carbon dioxide we emit is supposedly going to cause $220 USD in losses in the future, which justifies throwing lots of money at efforts to reduce emissions — like subsidizing EVs and solar panels, and inventing cricket burgers. This is called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). But half of that imaginary cost was the devastation higher temperatures would theoretically wreak on agriculture — which doesn’t make sense given that plants eat CO2 for breakfast. But for years bureaucrats and scientists have been telling us the damage in crops was going to cost $102USD per ton of carbon, and investors and politicians have been feeding that into their cash registers, and it’s all wrong.

Ten years ago Challinor et al did a big meta-review of crop changes with temperature, using 1,722 records, but many of these records had no figures for CO2 itself. And the whole point of calculating the social cost of carbon really depends on calculating what happens when CO2 rises, and supposedly causes temperatures to rise too. In 2017 Moore et al took those numbers […]

March 27th, 2025 | Tags: , , , | Category: Biology, Flora, Global Warming, USA | Print This Post Print This Post | | Comments (50)

Invisible costs of renewables: “Staggeringly high” $125b for US electricity consumers

A major new “nail in coffin” study shows the more renewables we force onto the market the more expensive electricity gets.

Everyday someone tells us renewables are cheap, but these estimates come from flawed “LCOE” method (at best) supposedly the lifetime cost, but without many indirect costs. Granted, it’s hard to figure out what the bill for renewable energy is. But what really matters to every man and his dog, is the cost effect on the whole system, not a cherry-slice comparison of a few sunny-windy hours a day which doesn’t take into account the effect that renewable energy has on the rest of the 24/7 electricity grid.

Greenstone, McDowell and Nath have analysed all 29 states in the US where there are laws demanding a certain percentage of energy be renewable. On average a 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis. Renewables are the car insurance bill that costs 3 times as much as your car. Any serious environmentalist would hate renewables.

Michael Shellenberger, Forbes

The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven […]

April 25th, 2019 | Tags: , , | Category: Cost, Global Warming, Grids, Renewable | Print This Post Print This Post | |

JoNova ignores cost benefit studies. What studies?

In a letter in The Australian Tom Biegler claims JoNova didn’t look at cost benefit studies:

Joanne Nova [Wasting money on Climate betrays the sick] bemoans the lack of cost-benefit analysis to support a price on carbon. She didn’t look very far. The energy economics literature is awash with estimates of the cost of both climate change and abatement measures. They disagree of course, but so would cost-benefit analyses of medical research expenditures, which Nova ignores.

A world where governments spent our money purely on the basis of cost-benefit assessments might look appealing but it’s not going to happen. Priorities reflect what voters want, annoying as that may be. It’s a small price to pay for our wonderful democracy that lets us keep arguing and trying to change each other’s minds.

Tom Biegler, St Kilda East, Vic

My reply sent to The Australian yesterday:

Tom Biegler thinks I’ve ignored cost benefit analysis of climate change abatement. No sir. There are no cost benefit analysis that start with checking the science. No institute or government committee has been paid to audit the IPCC, the BOM or CSIRO’s findings. All the reports assume that the UN […]

May 10th, 2011 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |