When the World Is on the Brink, $3.5 Trillion Is a Pittance
Mr. Lustgarten is an environmental reporter for ProPublica. There will be no bargains with an overheating climate. As President Biden takes an unfinished plan for U.S. emissions cuts to a global climate conference in Glasgow next week, Congress and the country remain hung up on what that agenda, wrapped in the Build Back Better Act, might cost. The current price tag of nearly $1.9 trillion for climate and other social spending might seem enormous though less so than the original $3.5 trillion plan. But over the long term, either would be a pittance. By zeroing in on those numbers, the public debate seems to have skipped over the economic ramifications of climate change, which promise to be historically disruptive and enormously expensive. What we dont spend now will cost us much more later. The compromise plan calls for a half-trillion dollars directed largely toward tax incentives for low-emission energy sources. But it omits other provisions, which will make it hard for Mr. Biden to reach his climate goals. The bills for natural disasters and droughts and power outages are already pouring in. Within a few decades, the total bill will be astronomical, as energy debts surge, global migration swells and industrial upheaval follows. The scale of the threat demands a new way of thinking about spending. Past budgets can no longer guide how governments spend money in the future. Some economists and climate scientists have calculated that climate change could cost the United States the equivalent of of its gross domestic product a year by 2100. Four percent is likely a conservative estimate; it leaves out consequential costs like damages from drought and climate migration. It assumes the United States and other nations eventually move away from energy generated by oil, coal and natural gas, though not as immediately as many say is needed. In this scenario, the planet will still warm by around three degrees Celsius by the end of the century from preindustrial levels, a change that would be disastrous. Four percent of American G.D.P. comes out to about $840 billion each year, if figured on last years economic output. Measured over a decade the way the Build Back Better Act is framed, its nearly $8.4 trillion. But the actual cost of climate change to the economy could easily be far greater. For every ton of carbon dioxide emitted starting today, temperatures will rise higher and faster. Solomon Hsiang, an economist and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the research group Climate Impact Lab, estimates that each degree Celsius of warming will erase 1.2 percent of G.D.P. per year, and those tolls will mount. Failure to curb climate emissions at all could put the United States on a path to losing 5 percent to as much as 10.5 percent of its G.D.P. annually. Based on last years G.D.P., that extreme and unlikely scenario could amount to nearly $2.2 trillion each year. In the more than three decades since Congress held on global warming, the nation has spent sweeping up from disasters, many now believed to have been made worse by climate change. Since 2017, floods, hurricanes and other disasters have cost . This year alone has seen 18 disasters causing losses of . And these figures dont account for the drag of slowed growth. Dr. Hsiang and his colleagues have estimated that Hurricane Maria set back Puerto Ricos prosperity . What happens as these events become more frequent and more devastating? The released under the Trump administration in 2018 lists the sorts of costs that Americans will see by late in the century in a scenario where emissions are allowed to continue to grow. Labor slowed by intense heat could cost the economy as much as $155 billion in lost wages each year; coastal property destruction, $118 billion; road damage, $20 billion; the spread of West Nile virus, $3 billion; and on and on. The warming climate will worsen virtually every existing service, from water and sewage treatment to mass transit to food distribution to health care, and erode the wealth of millions. Dr. Hsiang, who presented his findings to Congress in 2019, estimates that over the next 80 years intensifying heat alone will reduce Americans incomes by $4 trillion to $10.4 trillion as farming becomes more difficult, food prices rise and labor productivity falls. Climate risks are already undercutting the value of real estate in the most vulnerable parts of the country, including the roughly $1.6 trillion worth of private property directly threatened by sea level rise and wildfires. Were going to be burning money just to adapt, he told me. Just the status quo is going to start costing us more. These numbers tell only part of the story, because the costs will be spread unequally. High-risk areas of the Gulf Coast could see 20 percent of their economies erased. Crop yields in parts of Texas and Oklahoma are to drop by 70 to 90 percent. People of color and the poor will likely fare worst. Still, not a single one of these projections is a foregone conclusion. Eliminating as much carbon dioxide emissions as possible now would reduce the cost to taxpayers later. The National Climate Assessment estimates that limiting warming to around two degrees Celsius would reduce economic harm in many cases by 30 percent to 60 percent. Research by the Union of Concerned Scientists suggests that emissions cuts now $780 billion worth of residential properties by 2100. Which brings us back to the sprawling reconciliation bill being assembled by Democrats in Congress. The original Build Back Better Act proposed several hundred billion dollars a year for the next 10 years to slash emissions by cleaning up electricity generation and making electric vehicles commonplace, among other things. (Medicare, subsidized child care and other family aid would also be expanded.) Any one of the versions under consideration in Congress would most likely pay for itself quickly, climate scientists say. Encouraging the transition to clean power and electrifying infrastructure is one way to make progress toward the emissions targets. Many economists contend that investing in social programs like health and child care will also help communities and families withstand climate-driven shocks. The nation is venturing into an era where the siloed definitions of programs infrastructure versus social welfare versus health care no longer match the blended nature of the threat. Economic policy is no longer distinct from environmental policy, because, for example, creating high-paying jobs in Texas isnt worth much if its too hot to work. Just as economists have linked hotter temperatures to declining crop yields, they have also linked them to more disease, more crime, more suicides and other effects on peoples health and well-being. All of them result in losses both social and economic and threaten the countrys strength and stability. Policymakers will have to start somewhere. Among the bills lesser-known provisions in the last publicly released version of the bill were funding to survey forests and to hire people to fight wildfires; to provide agricultural research for farmers whose crops wont grow in hotter climates; to help homeowners transition from gas appliances to low-emission technologies and to study health risks linked to climate change. Taken as a whole, these trillion-dollar-plus plans look more like down payments investments in keeping the planet, and the U.S. economy and standard of living, as close as possible to the way it is now. Not to invest in these societal defenses today looks like an embrace of chaos and a choice to roll the dice on a period of unpredictable and disruptive change probably greater than anything in human existence. When the stakes are viewed this way, investing in defending economic stability seems conservative. Failing to respond to the scientific and economic forecasts is what seems dangerously radical. Abrahm Lustgarten is an environmental reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. to get its next investigation.