The Supreme Court is rebuffing an attempt from red states to block the Biden administration from using a key climate accounting metric in its decision making.
In a new order on Thursday, the high court denied the states’ request to review a ruling that enabled the Biden administration to use the climate impacts measurement.
The order did not provide insight into the court’s reasoning.
So what is this all about? The metric in question, known as the “social costs” of greenhouse gases, is a set of values that help the government calculate the climate costs or benefits of its actions.
The Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have all used social cost values for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, but the Trump administration put a much lower cost on their release.
A higher cost of these gases may be used to justify taking more stringent climate actions, while a lower cost could justify actions that are less stringent.
But, the Biden administration has met GOP pushback: Republican attorneys general say that their states are harmed when high values are used to evaluate potential oil and gas leasing on their lands.
Since the states receive revenue from those leases, they may end up shortchanged if less land is leased because of the climate costs, the attorneys general argued.
At their request, a federal court in Louisiana temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s use of the metric in February, but in March, that ruling was halted, reinstating the use of the social costs.
Late last month, 10 Republican attorneys general asked the Supreme Court to once again block the administration’s use of the social costs.
Read more about the case here.