9 signs you’re having a heart attack that you probably don’t know, including those more likely to affect women
Rachel Hosie – September 2, 2022
Fatigue, lightheadedness, and nausea can be symptoms of a heart attack.Getty
The most common symptom of a heart attack for both men and women is chest pain.
However, women are more likely to experience additional symptoms, a new report states.
These include nausea, indigestion, shortness of breath, and palpitations, a cardiologist said.
Common and lesser-known heart attack symptoms, including those more likely to affect women, have been highlighted in a report by the American Heart Association (AHA).
A heart attack is when the supply of blood to the heart is suddenly blocked, usually by a blood clot, and can be life-threatening.
In the US, about 805,000 people have a heart attack every year, with one happening every 40 seconds, according to the CDC. One in five people are unaware they’re having a heart attack, the organization states. However, knowing the signs can help people get treatment faster.
Chest pain is the most common symptom of a heart attack
Chest pain is the most common and recognizable symptom of a heart attack, according to the review, and is often felt as pressure or discomfort behind or below the sternum (breastbone), and may radiate to the jaw, shoulder, arm, or upper back.
Other co-occuring symptoms include shortness of breath, fatigue, unusual sweating, nausea, and lightheadedness.
Some people have muscle aches during a heart attack
Although chest pain is “the most common presenting sign,” some people experience other pain, Dr. Stacey Rosen, cardiologist and senior vice president for the Katz Institute for Women’s Health at Northwell Health, told Insider.
Less common symptoms of a heart attack include muscle aches around the back and shoulders, indigestion or heartburn, fainting spells, and confusion, Rosen said.
According to a review of seven studies cited in the report on the early stages of acute coronary syndrome — which is a group of conditions that heart attacks fall under — early symptoms also include disturbed sleep, headaches, anxiety, and gastrointestinal problems.
Women are more likely to experience symptoms other than chest pain, such as nausea
There are differences in how men and women experience heart attacks.
“Historically, it was believed that women do not experience chest pain in the setting of a heart attack but we now know that this is the most common symptom for men and women, but that women are more likely to have additional symptoms,” Rosen said.
Symptoms more common to women include nausea, back and shoulder pain, indigestion, shortness of breath, fatigue, and palpitations, she said.
One study cited in the review found that younger women who had heart attacks were more likely to have three or more symptoms including pain below the ribs, palpitations, and pain or discomfort in the jaw, neck, arms or shoulders when compared with men.
Fires Rage In California As Heat Wave Brings Record-Breaking Temperatures
Lydia O’Connor – September 1, 2022
California is facing multiple heat-related woes this week that have become all too familiar in the state: record-breaking temperatures, out-of-control wildfires and widespread power outages.
The intense heat wave began engulfing the Golden State ahead of Labor Day Weekend, prompting warnings from the National Weather Service on Wednesday and a state of emergency declaration from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Temperatures may soon reach into the mid-110s inland and low 100s on the coast, posing “a high to very high threat not only to more heat-sensitive populations such as the elderly and those without air-conditioning, but to the general population as well due to the prolonged duration of excessively hot temperatures,” the NWS warned, adding that people should expect “little relief from the heat overnight.”
Several places in Southern California have already seen the heat wave break daily temperature records, including a staggering 112 degrees in Los Angeles County’s Burbank and Woodland Hills. Orange County’s Anaheim, home to Disneyland, hit 106 degrees, clocking its hottest-ever August day on record.
People should prepare for the heat to get worse and last into next week, NWS officials said.
A mother stands with her 5-year-old son, whose school was evacuated during the Route Fire, on Wednesday. (Photo: Mario Tama via Getty Images)
A mother stands with her 5-year-old son, whose school was evacuated during the Route Fire, on Wednesday. (Photo: Mario Tama via Getty Images)
With heat in bone-dry, drought-stricken California comes wildfires. Castaic’s Route fire north of Los Angeles has burned more than 5,000 acres since erupting a day earlier, forcing evacuations and shutting down lanes on a major freeway. It remained only 12% contained as of Thursday morning.
“As you know, the weather conditions are extreme, and excessive heat, low humidity and steep terrain are going to be some of the most challenging conditions that our firefighters are facing today,” Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesperson Sheila Kelliher Berkoh said in a Thursday morning update to reporters.
“Yesterday we had seven individuals that were treated for heat-related injuries,” said the department’s deputy chief, Tom Ewald, noting that they’ve all recovered enough to be released from the hospital.
On Wednesday, news crews spotted a phenomenon known as “fire tornadoes” or “fire whirls,” which are spinning columns of rising hot air. KTLA estimated those in the Route fire were around 20 feet tall.
Another blaze that broke out Wednesday along the California-Mexico border has surpassed 4,000 acres and remains just 5% contained.
The demand for air conditioning and other electricity needs in the coming days is expected to put immense strain on California’s already-overloaded power grid, which could mean rolling blackouts across the state if people don’t conserve.
“This is just the latest reminder of how real the climate crisis is, and how it is impacting the everyday lives of Californians,” Newsom said in a statement. “While we are taking steps to get us through the immediate crisis, this reinforces the need for urgent action to end our dependence on fossil fuels that are destroying our climate and making these heat waves hotter and more common.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
Positive Views of the Supreme Court Drop Sharply After Abortion Ruling
Madeleine Carlisle – September 1, 2022
Texas Challenges Elecetion Results at Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court stands on December 11, 2020 in Washington, DC. Credit – Getty Images—Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
Favorable views of the Supreme Court have dropped since the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, a new Pew Research Center survey found, driven largely by a steep drop in approval among Democrats.
In its 35 years of polling on the court, Pew has never documented a wider partisan gap in views of the institution. In August, just 28% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they view the Supreme Court favorably. That’s the lowest rating Democrats have ever given the court in the poll’s history—18 percentage points lower than in January before the court gutted abortion rights, and almost 40 points lower than in 2020.
Favorable opinions of the court among Republicans, on the other hand, have moderately increased. In January, 65% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents viewed the court favorably, while 73% said the same in August.
Overall, Pew found the American public is split over the Supreme Court: 48% of the public views the court favorably, while 49% holds an unfavorable view. Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at Pew Research Center, says this is the highest percentage of Americans sharing unfavorable views of the Supreme Court that Pew has documented in more than three decades. In August 2020, for example, Pew found that 70% of Americans held favorable views of the high court.
The survey released Thursday was conducted among 7,647 U.S. adults, including 5,681 registered voters, between August 1 and 14. Nonpartisan Pew Research Center said the intention of the survey was to understand the public view of the high court after its term concluded in June with several high-profile rulings along largely ideological lines, including the overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The portion of Democrats who believe the U.S. Supreme Court has too much power has almost tripled since 2020, and increased by more than 20 points this year alone: 64% percent of Democrats said the court has too much power, compared to 40% in January. The survey found that 45% of U.S. adults overall said the court has too much power, which is 15 points higher than in January. 48% of the public said the court has the “right amount of power” and only 5% said the court does not have enough power.
“We are seeing a shift in a lot of different components of how Americans view the court,” says Kiley. “We see a growing share of Americans saying that the court has too much power. A growing share of Americans also say that they see the court as conservative.”
Pew found Americans’ favorability ratings of the Supreme Court is similar to what it was in 2015, when the high court issued another controversial landmark decision: Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended same-sex couples the right to marriage. In July 2015 after the ruling, Pew found that 48% of Americans had a favorable opinion of the court, while 43% viewed it unfavorably, and 61% of Republicans viewed the court unfavorably. The partisan divide over the Supreme Court is even starker today.
DRIED UP: Texas cities in fear of running out of water
Saul Elbein – September 1, 2022
The American West is experiencing its driest period in human history, a megadrought that threatens health, agriculture and entire ways of life. DRIED UP is examining the dire effects of the drought on the states most affected — as well as the solutions Americans are embracing.
AUSTIN, Texas — As the Western U.S. suffers under its worst drought in a millennium, the government of Texas, a state that faces its own unique set of dangers from extreme weather, is at last turning to deal with the threat that climate change poses to its long-term water supply.
Texas’s situation is sufficiently dire that in July, a majority-Republican panel on the state legislature voted unanimously to require the state water planning board to consult with the state climatologist as it advises cities in planning to meet the state’s water needs in the future.
The rule change “removes the possibility that the political climate could harm [local water officials’] ability to plan responsibly for the future,” state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D), a major backer of the shift, told The Hill.
“It kind of insulates the regional water authorities from political pressures that would harm their ability to do what they need to do,” Johnson said.
But that process won’t bear fruit for years — and Texans increasingly worry that the crisis is here now.
Never rains but it pours
The most recent demonstration of the volatile climate was last month’s flash downpours that stunned Johnson’s hometown of Dallas — a record rainfall that interrupted the city’s longtime drought, running off baked earth and acres of asphalt infrastructure to flood much of the city.
Those kinds of events offer a foretaste of the future Texas can expect, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told The Hill.
“You saw record dry conditions week after week after week — and then all of a sudden, a summer’s worth of rain in a single day,” Hayhoe said.
For much of the state, annual levels of rainfall may not change much — but that average conceals potentially lethal extremes of drought and flood, she said. “The amount of precipitation is staying the same. But the distribution is changing. It’s getting more extreme in both directions.”
Even if rainfall totals and distribution both stayed the same — which is unlikely — the simple fact of rising heat under climate change could presage water shortages, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told The Hill.
“Lakes evaporate faster, water in the ground evaporates faster,” said Nielsen-Gammon, who is also a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
That’s a problem for a state whose water storage strategy relies heavily on a collection of nearly 200 open-air reservoirs, exposed at all times to the baking sun. Moisture sucked into the air can also worsen flash storms, making rain events large enough to overwhelm the ability of soils to absorb them and catchment infrastructure to trap them.
Population growth looms
When these disruptive impacts are added to the booming populations foreseen by the Texas Water Development Board — expected by 2070 to surge from around 30 million to 52 million — they create a situation that worries many water planners interviewed by The Hill.
Much of that growth is expected along the dry and vulnerable I-35 corridor that connects Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio, Austin and the enormous collection of towns and cities surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth. The highway roughly divides Texas’s wet east from its dry west.
With that influx of people will come new water-dependent industries, from manufacturing plants such as the new Tesla facility going up outside Austin to more than a dozen high-tech semiconductor factories. And even with climate change making the weather ever more extreme, the state is fighting hard to protect fossil fuels. Those take a lot of water too, particularly when oil and gas is extracted through fracking.
“If any community in the state fails, and its water supply, that is big national, international news, and then has impacts on, I would argue, on the economic growth and perception of Texas,” Robert Mace of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment told local station KXAN, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media.
The looming prospect of a more intense and unpredictable drought-flood cycle presents a fearsome challenge for water planners.
It’s also one that — at least as it pertains to climate change — local officials have largely been left to figure out on their own, state water experts told The Hill.
For now, members of the Water Development Board “certainly don’t appear to be addressing [climate issues] directly,” Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist, told The Hill.
In contrast to the state’s specific and data-driven approach to planning for population growth, “there isn’t any official projection as far as streamflow or groundwater recharge impacts from climate change,” he added.
“It’d be really nice if individual water suppliers weren’t left to their own devices to tackle the issue.”
But the Texas Water Development Board’s planning process has traditionally looked backward, not forward, in envisioning the worst-case scenario that managers should plan for.
“By not considering climate change, we’re counting on water that’s probably not going to be there in the future,” Mace told KXAN said. “And so that increases the risk of reservoirs going dry, and of people losing their water supplies.”
Incorporating climate planning, however, is extraordinarily difficult.
“The key word with climate is complicated,” Matt Nelson, a water resources professional at the Texas Water Development Board, told The Hill.
Even at the state level, Nelson said, models are ambiguous, leaving the coming effects on the ground unclear. That means that state officials who move quickly to, say, increase supply are at risk of installing expensive and potentially “maladaptive” infrastructure aimed at solving the wrong problem, he added.
The long-term trend of climate change — to the extent that it’s clear — is also easily drowned out in the near-term chaos of Texas weather, he said.
“There can be more substantial risk in the near term than a climate long-term effect,” Nelson said.
Local groups take action
Some individual water suppliers have taken the state’s absence as an invitation to make their own plans.
For the city of Austin, the onrushing threat of climate change has led the city to study its own vulnerability — and to secure its water supply out past 2100, by which point its population is expected to triple from 1.1. million to 3.3 million.
“Water utilities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change. The nature of our product is such that we have to be responsive and adaptive to these changes as they’re happening in real time,” program manager Marisa Flores Gonzalez of Austin Water told The Hill.
Over the turbulent century to come, “we may have periods of time where we have plenty of water around — more water than we want,” Flores Gonzalez said.
“But we need to be able to take advantage of those supplies when they’re present during average or wet conditions and store that water so that we can make use of it during drought times.”
Austin is exploring a number of ways to do this. City officials are scouting locations where excess water could be injected into natural subterranean caverns in periods of abundance — in effect creating an artificial aquifer, immune to evaporation, that the city can draw on during the extended dry periods to come.
Groundwater injection is a measure that many other cities around the state are pursuing — most notably San Antonio, an hour’s drive south of Austin, but also smaller cities such as El Paso and even folk music mecca Kerrville.
Dallas-Fort Worth and other cities of the north Texas sprawl are building new reservoirs as fast as possible, and both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are exploring ways to pipe in water from other basins as they look to a future where their own stores will be overtaxed.
But with “really out of the box unprecedented things are definitely being discussed, we often neglect the easiest and most common one — which is conservation,” Hayhoe said.
Austin, for example, has winnowed the amount of water needed per person per day by a nearly a third since the 1990s, and it’s about a quarter of the way through a campaign to switch all the city’s analog water meters to leak-detecting smart ones.
And the city is experimenting with pilot sewage recycling systems — which treats wastewater on-site for reuse in watering, fountains and flushing toilets — which could ultimately cut demand for water by 75 percent, KXAN reported.
At the extreme end of this strategy, the residents of Big Spring, Texas — in the state’s arid far west — drink purified and treated wastewater, a system officially called “direct potable reuse” and sometimes derided as “toilet to tap,” public radio station WHYY reported.
‘The lowest point that I’ve ever seen’
Nelson at the Water Development Board says the board is working to incorporate usable climate models into its planning process. Board researchers are working with Nielsen-Gammon to try and derive standardized rules and models that are sufficiently flexible to bring to bear on state planning processes, such as trying to figure out how changing heat levels will impact evaporation from different regions’ lakes and rivers.
The state itself lags behind growing cities such as Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, where local governments have done their own expensive climate forecasting — and many of which are already in the process of securing new supplies against their booming populations.
But most of Texas’s more than 1,200 incorporated towns and cities don’t have the resources to do their own climate planning — and are less likely to have multiple options to draw from in the case of a crisis.
That’s happening even just west of Austin, as former cattle ranches in the region known as the Hill Country — popular for its wineries and swimming holes — get converted into housing developments, which demand water for taps, toilets and lawns.
Wieman warned that these communities are draining the Lower Trinity Aquifer to the “tipping point where our demand for water resources has outpaced the ability of our aquifers and rivers to replenish themselves,” Wierman added.
A cruel paradox of Texas water politics is that those municipalities most vulnerable to climate change are likely to be least willing or able to prepare on their own.
The smaller the city, Nielsen-Gammon said, “the smaller the water supply — and the less likely they will be able to deal with climate change and possibly not even be willing to consider it because they have more immediate concerns.”
It’s those bodies that are at the greatest risk from climate change, Perry Fowler of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network told KXAN.
“If local entities aren’t already looking at fortifying their water sources, then they’re already really behind the eight ball on that,” Fowler said.
KXAN’s Mia Abbe and Christopher Adams contributed to this report.
Melting Himalayan Glaciers Are Making Pakistan’s Floods Worse
Archana Chaudhary and Aaron Clark – September 1, 2022
(Bloomberg) — Every year, as the weather warms, teams of Indian scientists trek the Himalayan mountains to study the Chhota Shigri glacier in India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh. For the past decade and a half, they’ve recorded the extent of snow cover, checked the temperature of the air and soil, observed the surface of ice formations and measured the discharge from seasonal snowmelt that feeds the river valleys below.
This year, record-breaking glacial melt washed the discharge measuring station clean away.
“We had installed it in June and by August we couldn’t even find the remnants,” said Mohd Farooq Azam, a glaciologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. “We had an intense heat wave in early summer when temperatures in March and April broke 100-year records. And we have had resulting glacial melt. Our team was on a glacier last week and we have seen record-breaking melt in the Himalayas.”Unprecedented heat waves that swept the planet this summer are melting snow and ice not just in Europe’s Alps but in the iconic Himalayan range, where the mountains shelter the largest reserve of frozen freshwater outside the North and South poles. Global warming is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers much faster than scientists previously thought, destabilizing a fragile system that’s helped regulate the earth’s atmosphere and key water cycles for millennia.
The impact is most acute in Pakistan, where floods have submerged farmland and cities, affecting more than 30 million people and killing upward of 1,000 since June.
There, glacial melt has added to severe monsoon rainfall driven by a warming Arabian Sea and the weather-warping effects of La Nina, creating what Pakistani officials have called a “climate catastrophe.” That deluge is just the beginning, however.
Extreme floods often lead to extreme drought. The Indus River basin, which begins in Tibet and flows through Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea near Karachi, is twice the size of France and generates 90% of Pakistan’s food. When the basin floods, much of the water flows to the ocean rather than seeping into the soil, paradoxically causing water scarcity. A World Bank study estimates that by 2050, 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion people in South Asia could be vulnerable to dwindling water supplies.Read More: New Weather Patterns Are Turning Water Into a Weapon
The consequences are poised to reverberate through the global economy long after the flood waters in Pakistan recede, adding to a litany of harvests from Brazil to France ruined by extreme weather this year. But disruption to a major cryosphere is also contributing to shifting global weather patterns that are warming oceans, raising sea levels and intensifying droughts, even in China.The Himalaya, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges contain almost 55,000 glaciers that feed river systems on which more than 1.3 billion people rely. More than 7,000 of those are in Pakistan itself, where melting ice and snow has formed thousands of high-altitude lakes prone to overflowing.“Science is very clear about the interconnectedness of the ocean and the active water cycle. Why are these two systems important? Because they regulate the earth’s atmosphere,” said Anjal Prakash, a research director and professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “The system that regulates the earth’s climate needs to be protected.”
India’s record-smashing heatwave, Pakistan’s floods and accelerating glacial melt in the “rooftop of the world” could shift the tenor of climate negotiations at COP27, which is taking place in November in Egypt. There, global warming is having adverse effects on the Nile, and making life harder for farmers in its increasingly salty delta.
Developing nations, responsible for a fraction of historical greenhouse gas emissions, will push their case for more funds from industrialized countries that have prospered for more than a century at the expense of the planet. The cash is meant to both compensate poorer nations for the adverse effects and help them adapt.
Pakistan is a glaring example. It’s classified as the world’s eighth most vulnerable country to climate change, but contributes 1% to global emissions of planet-warming gases, according to Mohsin Hafeez, Pakistan’s representative at the International Water Management Institute.
“Pakistan will need to be more vigilant and take more measures to build capacities to deal with climate change,’’ Hafeez said. “But Pakistan cannot manage things on its own.”
Floods and droughts have affected human civilizations since ancient times, but they’re increasing in frequency and intensity as the planet warms.
When the earth heats up, more water evaporates and is captured in the atmosphere, creating drought and, when it finally rains, a torrent. In Pakistan, which already gets annual monsoon downpours, it means severe flooding will become more frequent. The period from January to July 2022 was the sixth-warmest start to a calendar year for the globe in records going back 143 years, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Information.
Read More: Deadly Floods Are Wreaking Global Havoc
The crisis is already prompting calls for lenders to forgive Pakistan’s debt to help it cope. Even before the flood, the country was grappling with financial and political turmoil. It secured a $1.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund this week to avert an imminent default.
The flood damage, however, is worth upwards of $10 billion, according to Finance Minister Miftah Ismail, equivalent to nearly 3% of the country’s gross domestic product last year. Swirling waters have set back the economy, affecting millions of acres of farmland, including about 40% of the country’s prized cotton crop in the worst-hit province of Sindh, according to Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal.
In less developed nations like Pakistan, where large populations and widespread poverty stretch government resources, there’s also been chronic underinvestment in flood defenses and the aging dams and canals built to irrigate drier areas. The lack of investment means the Tarbela and Mangla reservoirs on either side of Islamabad have become so choked with silt sweeping down from the mountains that they’re less able to contain floodwaters and prevent inundation further downstream.
Pakistan may get aid to help shelter those displaced, but its financial problems mean there likely won’t be much left to invest in that infrastructure.
Pakistan’s Catastrophe Could Have Been Avoided: David Fickling
As Chair of the Group of 77, a coalition of 134 developing countries, Pakistan, along with India and others, should make a case for loss and damages from these extreme weather events at COP27, according to Fahad Saeed, an Islamabad-based climate scientist with Climate Analytics.
“The floods this year are a wake up call for everyone,’’ said Saeed. “This is the effect that a 1.1 degree Celsius rise has brought upon us. The result is climate events that are beyond tolerable levels of low and medium income nations.’’
The climate clock is ticking even on the tallest peaks. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal predicts the Himalayas could lose 64% of their ice by 2100 — within a human lifetime — reshaping the face of mountains that have inspired human endeavor.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya region, which stretches from Afghanistan to northern Myanmar, is home to iconic peaks, including Mount Everest and K2, which have attracted generations of explorers and climbers. Even that’s changing.
Snow and ice is crashing through mountain villages, leveling hotels and this summer prompted officials in Nepal to say they planned to move the base camp for Mount Everest expeditions off the rapidly thinning Khumbu glacier as crevasses increasingly appear in the area where climbers sleep. They told the BBC they’d move the site to a lower altitude where there’s no year-round ice.
“The heat waves this year and the massive floods in Pakistan are a warning,” said Azam, the Indian glaciologist. “This is the point at which we human beings simply have to turn back.’’
The US is drastically undercounting the cost of climate change damages
Tim McDonnell – September 1, 2022
The economic impacts of climate change are likely to be more than three times higher than what economists and US government officials have previously expected, according to a major analysis published Sept. 1 in the journal Nature.
The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is a metric used by the government to evaluate the costs and benefits of climate policies and investments in infrastructure. It projects the costs of flooding, crop failure, higher bills for air conditioning, and loss of life under different future climate change scenarios, and then translates that estimate into a cost per ton of CO2 emissions.
The SCC is an inexact measure, but it’s a critical tool for policymakers and is often cited in legal and political battles over clean energy spending and greenhouse gas regulations. If the cost is very low, then any spending required to cut emissions probably isn’t worth it. If it’s high, then more aggressive climate policies are economically justified.
Under president Barack Obama, the US’s official SCC was about $51. President Donald Trump slashed artificially that to about $4. President Joe Biden quickly re-established the Obama figure, and tasked a team of economists to develop a new estimate, a process which is ongoing. The Nature study, which was conducted independently by two dozen researchers from several think tanks and top-tier universities, is meant to inform the government’s analysis. It pegs the SCC at $185.
Why the previous social cost of carbon was much too low
The new estimate is much higher for several reasons. Trump’s estimate was limited to impacts in the US, whereas Biden’s and the new estimate are global (which makes more sense, given that the US has an economic stake in global supply chains, in addition to ethical obligations to consider impacts outside its borders). The new estimate also incorporates updated models of the damages themselves, reflecting the latest science on how severe climate change is likely to be and the implications for crop yields, health impacts, and other aspects of life and the economy.
Most importantly, the new estimate uses a lower “discount rate,” the rate by which future damages are given less value than current costs. (In other words, a dollar saved today is worth more than one saved tomorrow). Trump’s discount rate was 7%; currently the rate is 3%. The new estimate uses a rate of 2%, which the authors say more closely matches real interest rates and changes in the value of the dollar over time.
The Biden administration has not announced when it will update its official SCC. If it lands on a number close to what the Nature researchers recommend, it would help the administration make a stronger case on everything from new methane regulations to buying electric vehicles for government fleets.
