Wyoming joins 10-State lawsuit against Biden over his Social Cost of Carbon Executive Order
by Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon
April 22, 2021
Wyoming has joined Louisiana and 8 other states in a lawsuit to prevent the Biden Administration from implementing an act of job-killing executive overreach that threatens to impose more burdens and harms on the American people.
Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are by-products of everyday activities in America today, including the production of electricity, natural gas, farming operations, a wide variety of industrial activities, the production of cement and other construction materials, and waste disposal. They are among the most common and prevalent byproducts of human economic activity.
In a recent Executive Order, President Biden established a "working group" made up of ederal appointees required to establish a damages value based upon global environmental damages from climate changes. These values are referred to as the "social cost of carbon," the "social cost of methane" and the "social cost of nitrous oxide." The methods used to calculate these values are deeply flawed, dramatically inflate the alleged costs associated with these gases, and ignore the corresponding benefits of the underlying economic activity.
Nevertheless, the President is requiring federal agencies to immediately begin quantifying the "global damage" of releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide using these flawed numbers.
"This Executive Order improperly changes how decisions are made by applying a selective and highly biased feel-good rationale that has the potential to significantly harm industries critical to the nation’s and my state’s livelihood," Governor Gordon said. "Arbitrarily justifying any decision to fit political circumstances, including decisions that could be devastating to Wyoming’s energy sector, is not only bad policy, but is unwise."
The executive order has wide-ranging impacts on decisions made by virtually every federal agency, including the Departments of Interior, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Environmental Protection, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and the U.S. Treasury. It is a very real thumb on the scale against the activities that make Wyoming and the nation’s economy successful. Through this suit Wyoming and its sister states seek to prevent President Biden and the federal government from using these inflated values in their decisions.
In addition to Louisiana and Wyoming, the following states joined in the lawsuit filed this morning in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.
A copy of the lawsuit may be found here.
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