The Biden administration asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit by more than a dozen Republican-led states seeking to block the U.S. government from strengthening the way it calculates the cost of greenhouse gas emissions.
The suit isn’t valid because the states haven’t yet been harmed by changes in the so-called social cost of emitting carbon dioxide, methane and other gases, which the government uses in analyzing the impact of policy decisions and actions, the Justice Department said in a June 4 filing in federal court in Missouri.
Since the Reagan era, every President has supervised a centralized process for the review of proposed regulations and, by executive order, required agencies to submit cost-benefit analyses that align with the President’s policymaking principles,” the administration said. “And beginning under President George W. Bush, agencies have used estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions when preparing those analyses.”
The case is part of an effort by Republican attorneys general to push back on President Joe Biden’s environmental agenda.