All posts tagged: Trump Administration

Market Failures: Pricing Carbon with Wishful Thinking

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Consider two numbers assigned to the same ton of carbon dioxide, each claiming scientific validity. The first: a figure between $1 and $7, representing the first Trump administration’s calculation of the societal damage caused by each ton of CO₂. The second: $190, representing the Biden administration’s calculation for that identical quantity of carbon. This metric, the social cost of carbon (SCC), is a single number meant to represent the total harm—from crop losses to health problems to sea-level rise—caused by emitting one ton of carbon dioxide. It has become a central battleground in U.S. climate policy. The usual explanation for this whiplash is political: one side follows science while the other ignores it. But that story misses a more fundamental problem. The first Trump administration didn’t need to deny climate science to gut the SCC—it simply exploited the metric’s built-in manipulability, using established government guidance to select assumptions that minimized the result. By changing just two parameters—the discount rate and geographic scope—the administration reduced the figure from $51 to between $1 and $7 per ton, …

Sheller Center Students File Tort Claims for Families Separated at the Border

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The Trump administration has engaged in a policy of family separation, which it ramped up in 2018. Under that policy, families apprehended for crossing the border outside of a port of entry were forcibly separated. Parents were placed in adult detention while their children were sent to shelters for unaccompanied minors. They were frequently subjected to cruel conditions of confinement, including overcrowding and the inability to obtain adequate nutrition, hygiene, medical care or mental health services. Notably, the administration expressly announced its family separation policy as a tactic to deter Central American migrants from seeking safety in the United States. In these facilities, parents and children endured weeks or even months without contact with one another. Parents and their children did not know when or if they would be reunited because immigration officials would not provide any information. The separation of parents from their children has predictably caused significant and long-lasting trauma to these families who had sought refuge in the United States. Through the Sheller Center for Social Justice, we represented eight families in …