By Anna Nowogrodzki
In September, Gernot Wagner hosted an unusual visitor at his small New York City apartment.
“The president of Austria dropped by” while he was in town for the United Nations General Assembly, says Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. And in President Alexander Van der Bellen’s hand was a printout of a Nature commentary that Wagner had written with his colleagues earlier this year.
The article offered advice on how to calculate the social cost of carbon — a metric that puts a monetary value on the future damage that climate change will cause. They discussed the piece for a good 15 minutes of the president’s one-hour visit — and Van der Bellen, an economist by training, was just one of the top climate policymakers who consulted Wagner about the piece.
Carbon costs
The social cost of carbon, which Wagner’s commentary addressed, is meant to capture all of the economic damages — including from extreme weather, altered agricultural outputs and changing health-care costs in a warmer world — of one tonne of emitted carbon dioxide. It is an essential figure for climate policy, baked into billions of dollars of US federal policy and spending decisions. Wagner’s article gave eight recommendations for how to accurately and transparently set that figure, such as accounting for the greater impact that climate change will have on people with low incomes.
Since the Nature piece, Wagner says he has corresponded with several experts in the administration of US President Joe Biden who are currently involved in calculating the social cost of carbon, including Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Elizabeth Kopits, a senior economist at the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Meanwhile, Wagner was also giving “an inordinate amount of television interviews in Austria”, his native country, he says. The country passed a carbon tax in early October. Wagner did not specifically advocate for a carbon tax as the best tool to address the social cost of carbon — and he can’t say for sure how his article affected that legislation — but he hopes that it showed “how science guides us toward a high social cost of carbon and the need for a high carbon price”.
In: Nowogrodzki, Anna. “How climate coverage can drive change.” Nature News (1 November 2021). DOI:10.1038/d41586-021-03002-7