Supreme Court rejects challenge to Biden's crucial climate metric

Highlights:

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in US climate policy, on Tuesday.

One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon—currently placed at $51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate.

It’s the second time the Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to the social cost of carbon.

The Obama administration, the first to require agencies to use this metric in assessing rules, placed the social cost of carbon at $43 a ton.

The Trump administration, in typical fashion, had slashed the number down to a couple bucks per ton.

Because the social cost of carbon is so influential in developing climate policy, some Republicans consider it a paragon of the “radical climate agenda.”

In recent months, the White House announced that it was considering applying the social cost of carbon more broadly across agencies, in everything from annual budgets and permitting decisions to fines for violating environmental regulations.