Government estimates put the expected cost of climate change at $2 trillion (in today’s dollars) per year by the end of the century. Who cares? What a terrible way of selling the need to contain climate change now! In a nation where kicking the can down the road and pretending that technology will ultimately solve it all are our embedded national “crisis management tools,” talking about stuff that will occur in three quarters of a century from now is beyond frustratingly stupid. How about looking at the trillions of dollars that we have already spent dealing with the ravages created by global warming? Compared to what our hard dollar costs are absolutely going to be and have been, the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the White House’s climate bill, is chump change.
Not one Republican Senator voted for the above act, claiming the bill represents reckless government spending. Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul watched large sections of their home state washing away as they voted against legislation aimed at preventing such disasters. And no, that’s not a picture of the Kentucky devastation above. It’s a highway in Philadelphia after Hurricane Ida in 2021. The GOP continues to maintain that climate change is just a hoax or exaggerated by Democrats seeking to kill business and impose their “distorted” vision of the future on average Americans. The problem is that we are getting closer to more horrible numbers today. Can-kicking, a GOP favorite, is downright exorbitantly expensive.
An August 12, 2020 report by the Environmental Defense Fund expresses the costs this way: “Billion-dollar weather disasters fueled by climate change are becoming more frequent and more devastating to state and local economies…The report, Climate Fueled Weather Disasters: Costs to State and Local Economies, quantifies the economic cost of specific extreme weather disasters on Americans today, including in specific states, as well as likely future costs if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and global temperatures continue to climb. Each of the weather events detailed in the report caused damages equaling or exceeding $1 billion in states such as Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa, among others…
“According to the report, which consolidates information from leading journals, government datasets and other key sources, both the incidence and cost of extreme weather events are on the rise. Since 1980, the United States has seen a four-fold increase in the annual number of severe weather disasters, including hurricanes, floods, wildfires and other events examined in this report. Those costs are putting a growing strain on the ability of federal and state agencies to respond to disasters at the same time that they are fighting to prevent the country from plunging further into a long-term, deep recession. The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that since 2005, the federal government, including FEMA, has spent at least $450 billion on disaster assistance.” Some of these events cause a billion or more dollars each. And remember, this report was issued before the escalating level of wildfires – some larger than entire US states – floods and searing, killing heat.
Writing for FastCompany.com (August 15th), Steven Bingler (CEO of Concordia: Community Centered Planning and Design, which was responsible for planning and managing the Unified New Orleans Plan for the recovery after Hurricane Katrina) and Martin C. Pedersen (executive director of the Common Edge Collaborative, a website dedicated to architecture, design, urbanism, and public engagement) explain: “For exploding climate-related costs, it’s instructive to look at Steven’s home state of Louisiana, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Following the devastating damage of Hurricanes Katrina, the financial impacts became so acute that policymakers were forced to consolidate all climate change planning and budgeting under a single Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), charged with identifying the most critical coastal restoration strategies and mitigation projects into a comprehensive Coastal Master Plan that is now updated every five years. To date more than 60 miles of barrier islands and berms have been constructed, 365 miles of levees improved, and 55,000 acres of wetlands revived. Going forward the CPRA is slated to spend $1 billion every year on mitigation projects, with the expectation that the program will continue at the same cost (or likely more) for at least another 50 years. For the imperiled state of Louisiana, this is not optional spending.
“In addition to these costly government programs, additional financial burdens have fallen on the private sector. Four major insurance companies along with a handful of smaller ones have declared bankruptcy since Hurricane Ida, and others have decided to either pass the burden on to existing insurees or leave the state in the wake of accelerating rates of risk associated with storm damage. These private sector failures have long been backed up by federal and state insurance programs, but these programs are now reaching the limits of their political efficacy, leaving many local citizens facing personal bankruptcy and a painful migration to higher ground (or out of state completely)…
“But Louisiana is hardly alone. The costly impacts of inland flooding, wildfires, and, perhaps most unforgiving of all environmental challenges, drought, are taking their toll on increasingly large swaths of the country. For example, more than half of Texas is currently experiencing extreme drought, and according to drought.gov, this year will be the sixth-driest year in the past 128 years. Meanwhile, it is August, the waters in the Gulf are heating up, and Houston, Galveston, and other vulnerable coastal cities are bracing once again for another active storm season. (Note that the price tag for rebuilding New Orleans and Houston, after Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, was more than $250 billion, or more than half of the cost of the climate bill, for just two storms)…
“This is only the beginning of a future that will leave our children and grandchildren to pay many trillions for environmental mitigation and restoration, due solely to the utter failure of our current generation to plan for these impending costs. And while our political leaders are haggling with what the fiscal watchdogs call ‘nice to have’ or ‘like to have’ legislation that gets them through the next election cycle, it is important to understand that the ‘must have’ costs of climate change will be much less forgiving.” And exactly who is going to pay for all this damage? Just the big corporations whose unending greenhouse effluents are untaxed and insufficiently regulated? Like the fossil fuel giants who tripled their profits in our inflationary oil shortage? Or all of us, directly or indirectly… by the trillions and trillions of hard dollar costs!
I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems that common sense has left the GOP building and bolted the doors towards an obvious solution closed.
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