deceptive information
How to Lie with Percentages
It’s easy to make something seem big or small, depending on how you present the numbers.
We’re told that a given policy will only reduce U.S. emissions by something like 1%, which sounds trivial. But total U.S. carbon emissions are 4.8 billion tons. One percent of that is 48 million tons, which is a lot of carbon. At the current estimate of the social cost of carbon, reducing U.S. emissions by 1% would prevent $9 billion of harm.
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