US$60/ton of Carbon

There’s a new paper out, by Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford University, on the Social Cost of Carbon. It is “Temperature impacts on economic growth warrant a stringent mitigation policy“, Nature Climate Change, 12^th January 2015. The principal result from this investigation is that the social cost of Carbon (“SCC”) is estimated at US$220/ton of CO₂ emitted in 2015 rather than the range of US$30/ton-US$40/ton adopted for planning purposes by the U.S. federal government. The corresponding cost for Carbon itself, then, is US$60/ton, since Carbon is 27% of a CO₂ molecule by mass.