In Calculating the Social Cost of Methane, Equity Matters

What is the cost of 1 ton of a greenhouse gas? When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future – in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the “social cost of carbon,” considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies.

Now a new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane – a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat – varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.

Published recently in the journal Nature, the study finds that by accounting for economic inequalities between countries and regions, the social cost of methane drops by almost a factor of 10 in sub-Saharan Africa and jumps by almost a factor of 10 for industrialized countries, such as the United States. The study calculated a global mean estimate of the social cost of methane of $922 per metric ton (not accounting for the inequity), decreasing to $130 per metric ton for sub-Saharan Africa and rising to $8,040 per metric ton for the U.S.

“The paper broadly supports the previous U.S. government estimates of the social cost of methane, but if you use the number the way it’s typically used – as a global estimate, as if all countries are equal – then it doesn’t account for the inequities,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Collins, one of the study’s co-authors.

Read more at DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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