Once upon a time, EPA and other agencies labored under the yoke of a cruel regime that was contemptuous of the “reality-based community,” but intimately aware of the needs and desires of the energy industry. Climate policy didn’t really happen in those days. Then the world changed.

In the first year of the new regime, EPA and NHTSA proposed a standard for tailpipe emissions, including an estimate of the “social cost of carbon,” or the value of the incremental damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Someone needs to tell the authors of this standard that we are free at last to take climate change seriously; you don’t have to keep censoring yourself, as you may have in the past. And once we start exercising that freedom, we will find that the social cost of carbon is much larger than the EPA/NHTSA estimates, which include …

It must be worthwhile; at least, I keep doing it. Wednesday was the third time in the last eight months that I’ve testified before a House committee about the costs of inaction on climate change, a topic I study at the Stockholm Environment Institute-US Center, a research institute affiliated with Tufts University in Boston.

The Energy and Commerce Committee launched a week of hearings on the Waxman-Markey bill, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” by one account, they have invited 67 witnesses to testify.

Wednesday was a staggeringly long day, beginning with Cabinet secretaries at 9:30 in the morning, then a panel of USCAP members (an alliance of major corporations and environmental groups, in support of climate legislation), then a panel that was half conservatives and skeptics (guess which party insisted on inviting them), and finally, starting just before 6:00 PM …