An appeals court halted a lower court’s ruling that prevented the Biden administration from using a key climate accounting metric in regulations and other decisions.
The Biden administration uses values known as the “social costs” of planet-warming gases to quantify the climate costs or benefits of the actions that it takes.
Last year, the administration temporarily reinstated interim estimates based on Obama-era figures, which gave more weight to climate impacts than Trump-era estimates. It also convened an interagency working group to calculate updated estimates.