This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
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A dirty little secret of climate change is that somebody wants us to pay much higher taxes and higher energy bills. But it's not the advocates of climate action. It's the other guys.
Make no mistake: The costs of switching to clean energy and an energy-efficient economy are far less than the costs of doing nothing.
A study released by the University of Maryland last October helps bring the cost issue into clearer focus. It concludes that the economic costs of unabated climate change in the United States will be major and nationwide.
Climate change will damage or stress essential municipal infrastructure such as water treatment and supply; increase the size and intensity of forest fires; increase the frequency and severity of flooding and drought; cause billions of dollars in damages to crops and property; lead to higher insurance rates; and even increase shipping costs in the Great Lakes-St Lawrence seaway because of lower water levels. And that's just a sampling.
"Climate change will affect every American economically in significant, dramatic ways, and the longer it takes to respond, the greater the damage and the higher the costs," lead researcher Matthias Ruth told ScienceDaily.
How big are those costs?
Much more work is needed to quantify them, and the national Climate Change Science Program should give more emphasis to both the social and economic costs of local climate impacts. But recent experience gives an indication of how large the costs could be. The University of Maryland study puts the combined storm damages in the U.S. since 1980 at more than $560 billion, even though the impacts of climate change are far from fully felt. Various estimates project that the maintenance of Alaska's infrastructure will cost $10 billion; property damage from rising sea levels will cost as much as $170 billion by 2100; and upgrading drinking and water treatment facilities will cost up to $2 billion over the next 20 years. Two federal insurance programs also are a harbinger of pain. Since 1980, taxpayer exposure under the Federal Crop Insurance Program has increased 26-fold to $44 billion (PDF). Several of the predicted consequences of climate change -- drought, wildfires, extreme weather, new exposure to pests -- will make that liability much worse.
Our liability under the National Flood Insurance Program will increase, too. Taxpayer exposure in that program has quadrupled since 1980 (PDF), approaching $1 trillion in 2005. The program had to borrow more than $17 billion from the Treasury to pay claims following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and it's likely that taxpayers will have to foot the bill.
"The national debate is often framed in terms of how much it will cost to reduce greenhouse gases, with little or no consideration of the cost of no response or the cost of waiting," the University of Maryland's lead researcher, Matthias Ruth, told ScienceDaily.
We can expect the demagogues to continue stressing that carbon pricing will mean higher energy bills, while aggressive federal action will mean higher taxes. They will continue to argue that climate action will ruin the economy. We shouldn't let them get away with it.
The truth is that spending money now to mitigate and adapt to climate change is an investment. Spending money later to cope with public health emergencies, drought, crop damage, and natural disasters is a waste.
It's climate change, not climate action, that will break the economy and burden the nation's taxpayers, and that liability gets bigger every year we delay.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
View as Flat
Delay And Deny Posted 3:10 am
09 Jan 2008
The student of knowledge (aims at) learning day by day; The student of Tao (aims at) losing day by day. By continual losing One reaches doing nothing (laissez-faire).
http://wayist.org/ttc%20compared/chap48.htm
My Log
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scanter Posted 7:21 am
09 Jan 2008
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/FloridaClimate.html
There's a summary of the report on our blog:
http://environmentaldefenseblogs.org/climate411/2007/11/2 ...
Sheryl Canter
Environmental Defense
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infp Posted 7:24 am
09 Jan 2008
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caniscandida Posted 7:09 pm
09 Jan 2008
And yet it is better than all that we saw, about animals that could not be rescued, in New Orleans after the Katrina flooding.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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clherzog Posted 6:58 am
10 Jan 2008
China and India are planning coal plant after coal plant. Increasing their impact while we spend billions reducing ours.
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RL Posted 11:25 am
07 Jun 2008
Environmental extremists routinely assert a "scientific consensus" that global warming is occurring, and that human activity somehow causes it. This week, however, over 31,000 scientists spoke up and reduced that myth to a smoldering rubble.
The environmentalists' alleged "scientific consensus" is much like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, behind which the supposedly infallible wizard dictated to his minions. Beyond that curtain, however, the wizard was nothing more than an ordinary little man perpetrating a fraud upon those who worshipped his doctrine. And once Toto removed that curtain, the fraud was exposed for all to see.
Similarly, environmentalists' mythical "scientific consensus" has served as a shroud behind which they have sought to maintain an air of infallibility. By falsely claiming a closed consensus and excoriating anyone who speaks out against their flawed orthodoxy, environmental extremists seek to prevent any objective, scientific debate that might inhibit their political agenda.
That shroud, however, was further torn this week by a 31,000-strong petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). According to the OISM's board of scientists, "a review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th Century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature."
To the contrary, the OISM notes that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have actually increased plant growth rates, among other positive effects. On this basis, the OISM concludes that "predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge."
Accordingly, the straightforward petition reads:
We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
The petition itself appears alongside a letter from the late Frederick Seitz, a former President of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Seitz stated that "the United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and technologies that depend upon coal, oil, natural gas and some other organic compounds." He therefore warned that, "this treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research into data on climate change does not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful."
It should be noted that the OISM's petition effort receives absolutely no funding from the energy industry, or from anyone else with a financial interest in the ongoing climate change debate. Rather, its funding derives entirely from private, non-tax-deductible contributions from individual donors.
Global warming alarmists will nevertheless exclaim, like the "wizard" in The Wizard of Oz, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Their agenda simply cannot tolerate dissent, contrary evidence, or objective discussion of the matter. Instead, they cling to the claim of a false consensus, and liken any objective disagreement to flat-earth proponents. According to Al Gore, for instance, "there is as strong a consensus on this issue as science has ever had."
Oh? Is it as strong as the supposed consensus when Newsweek announced on November 23, 1992 that "the advent of a new ice age, scientists say, appears to be guaranteed," and that "the devastation will be astonishing?"
Gore's comment is obviously absurd on its face. A scientific consensus does exist in well-settled scientific subjects, such as the laws of gravity or physics. But this is certainly not the case when it comes to climate change.
We can thank the OISM, its leadership and its 31,000 participating scientists for helping shatter the environmentalists' myth.
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RL Posted 11:40 am
07 Jun 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 2:25 pm
07 Jun 2008
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/federal_iss ...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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