The case for “carbon scoring” bills

If you want to know how much a congressional bill is going to cost, you take it to the Congressional Budget Office to figure it out. If you want to know the climate effects, there’s nothing similar — until now, Ben writes.

Driving the news: Resources for the Future (RFF), a respected nonpartisan think tank, just launched the Carbon Scoring Project.

• It will “provide policymakers with quantitative and qualitative climate information about their bills, reported in a standardized and accessible format.”

Why it matters: This kind of inside baseball has real-world consequences. More, faster and transparent analysis about how bills would affect U.S. progress toward its climate goals is needed, backers say.

• And emissions are influenced by a lot more than legislation explicitly about energy or climate.
• Farm, highway and transportation, defense and many other policies are in the mix.

How it works: The RFF team will estimate various bills’ effects on greenhouse gases, consumer prices, equity, power generation, and more.

• The first step is creating a baseline, using analysis of the new climate law, to compare new legislation against. They’ll begin with climate bills and then branch out.
• “We expect future scores to be dependent on interest from lawmakers and the broader needs of the policymaking community,” Kevin Rennert, who directs RFF’s federal climate policy work, said via email.

 Zoom out: To be clear, there’s hardly an information vacuum now. RFF itself has long been modeling legislation.

• More broadly, various companies and groups — some with an advocacy bent one way or the other, some not — perform climate analyses of major bills.

Yes, but: Backers of carbon scores, an idea batted around in wonk circles for a while, say there are gaps and limitations and that a standardized system is needed.

• A 2022 Brookings Institution post notes the current “assortment of models” use a patchwork of assumptions and create “challenges for communication and consistency.”

The intrigue: Those Brookings analysts say a nonpartisan and independent federal entity should take a leading role in scoring the climate impacts of legislation.

The Congressional Budget Office would be a “logical landing place.”

Rennert said the RFF project is a test bed. “We’re looking to demonstrate what it could look like for the government to have that capacity in-house and use it systematically in a standardized way.”