#Jason schwartz social cost methane full#

The 'social cost of carbon' (SCC) is the present value of the stream of future damages from one additional unit of carbon emissions in a particular year.

Recognition of the full SCM, which has typically been undervalued, may help catalyze actions to reduce emissions and thereby provide a broad set of societal benefits. The results indicate that efforts to reduce methane emissions via policies spanning a wide range of technical, regulatory and behavioural options provide benefits at little or negative net cost. Examining recent trends in methane and carbon dioxide, we find that increases in methane emissions may have offset much of the societal benefits from a slowdown in the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions. In the agricultural sector, changes in livestock management practices, promoting healthy diets including reduced beef and dairy consumption, and reductions in food waste have been promoted as ways to mitigate emissions, and these are shown here to indeed have the potential to provide large societal benefits (∼$50–150 billion per year). Within the energy sector, renewables compare far better against use of natural gas in electricity generation when incorporating these social costs for methane. Our results suggest that ∼110 of 140 Mt of identified methane abatement via scaling up existing technology and policy options provide societal benefits that outweigh implementation costs. These values are ∼100 and 50 times greater than corresponding social costs for carbon dioxide. ∼$2400 per ton and ∼$3600 per ton with 5% and 3% discount rates respectively. Calculating the SCM using consistent temporal treatment of physical and economic processes and incorporating climate- and air quality-related impacts, we find large SCM values, e.g. Use of a broad measure of social welfare is also an attractive alternative or supplement to emission metrics focused on a temperature target in a given year as it incentivizes action to provide benefits over a broader range of impacts and timescales. Quantifying these damages to the planetary commons by calculating the social cost of methane (SCM) facilitates more comprehensive cost-benefit analyses of methane emissions control measures and is the first step to potentially incorporating them into the marketplace. These roadmaps may therefore reduce social and political barriers to implementing clean-energy policies.Methane emissions contribute to global warming, damage public health and reduce the yield of agricultural and forest ecosystems.

Thus, 100% conversions are technically and economically feasible with little downside. The spacing area between wind turbines, which can be used for multiple purposes, will be ~1.6% of U.S. The new footprint over land required will be ~0.42% of U.S. These plans will result in each person in the U.S. Converting would further eliminate ~$3.3 (1.9-7.1) tril./yr in 2050 global warming costs to the world due to U.S. Over all 50 states, converting would provide ~3.9 million 40-year construction jobs and ~2.0 million 40-year operation jobs for the energy facilities alone, the sum of which would outweigh the ~3.9 million jobs lost in the conventional energy sector. Based on a parallel grid integration study, an additional 4.4% and 7.2% of power beyond that needed for annual loads would be supplied by CSP with storage and solar thermal for heat, respectively, for peaking and grid stability. all-purpose load would be met with ~30.9% onshore wind, ~19.1% offshore wind, ~30.7% utility-scale photovoltaics (PV), ~7.2% rooftop PV, ~7.3% concentrated solar power (CSP) with storage, ~1.25% geothermal power, ~0.37% wave power, ~0.14% tidal power, and ~3.01% hydroelectric power. Conversion would reduce each state’s end-use power demand by a mean of ~39.3% with ~82.4% of this due to the efficiency of electrification and the rest due to end-use energy efficiency improvements. The plans contemplate 80-85% of existing energy replaced by 2030 and 100% replaced by 2050. ABSTRACT This study presents roadmaps for each of the 50 United States to convert their all-purpose energy systems (for electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) to ones powered entirely by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS).

#Jason schwartz social cost methane full#