The US is drastically undercounting the cost of climate change damages

The economic impacts of climate change are likely to be more than three times higher than what economists and US government officials have previously expected, according to a major analysis published Sept. 1 in the journal Nature.

The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is a metric used by the government to evaluate the costs and benefits of climate policies and investments in infrastructure. It projects the costs of flooding, crop failure, higher bills for air conditioning, and loss of life under different future climate change scenarios, and then translates that...