News Archive

Professor Dan Cole was recently quoted in The Daily Climate, a publication of Environmental Health Sciences. His comments appeared in an article entitled, “ Revised data show feds understate climate costs: Preliminary analysis suggests impacts from climate change could run twice as high as previous estimates, potentially giving regulators more firepower to justify emissions-cutting regulations.” (January 27, 2011, http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/01/climate-impact-increase)
Professor Cole says, “A precise determination of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is, at present, not as important as introducing institutions that will start moving greenhouse gas emissions in the right direction. That’s not to say that the SCC is not important; only that, when we are spending next to nothing to mitigate climate change, it hardly matters whether the SCC is $21/ton, $35/ton, or $50/ton.”

The article states, “ Enough is known about the impacts of climate change to warrant a precautionary approach no matter where economic impact lands, added Daniel Cole, a law professor at Indiana University who studies environmental policy.

‘There seems little chance of rolling the ball too far - the risk of spending too much in the near term on climate change seems remote,’ he said.

When the federal government first started regulating conventional air pollutants in the 1970s, he noted, policy makers had little information on the cost of pollution's impact.

‘But we had a strong sense they were costing us too much, and we needed to do something,’ Cole added. “
Professor Cole is the R. Bruce Townsend Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis and a member of the law school’s Environmental Policy Forum. He is also Affiliated Faculty of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU-Bloomington. He teaches and writes in the areas of Property, Natural Resources Law, Land Use, Environmental Protection, and Law & Economics. He has also written extensively about Poland and Polish law.