Study assesses climate cost of US manufacturing

According to the team at the University of California, Davis, accounting for these costs in market prices could encourage progress toward climate-friendly alternatives. Their findings are detailed in Environmental Research Letters. 

“We wanted to look at the cost to society to produce these materials,” said Elisabeth Van Roijen, lead author and recent Ph.D. graduate from the UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Van Roijen, undergraduate researcher Paikea Colligan and postdoctoral researcher Seth Kane set out to calculate the missing climate costs for producing aluminium, iron and steel, brick, cement, lime, gypsum, asphalt, glass and plastics. 

They gathered data on the amounts of these materials produced in the US, the energy used to make them and the greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing process. They assessed the climate costs of emissions using the Environmental Protection Agency’s Social Cost of Carbon standard. This is an estimate of the costs of carbon dioxide emissions, such as preventing, mitigating and recovering from climate-related natural disasters.