From ruined bridges to dirty air, EPA scientists price out the cost of climate change – “The cost of inaction is really high, and the cost of reducing emissions pales in comparison”

By Julia Rosen
8 April 2019

(Los Angeles Times) – By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages, crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study in Monday’s edition of Nature Climate Change. No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.

However, they also found that cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and proactively adapting to a warming world, would prevent a lot of the damage, reducing the annual economic toll in some sectors by more than half.

Experts called the report the most comprehensive analysis yet of the staggering diversity of societal impacts that climate change will have on the American economy.

“It is an extraordinarily ambitious project,” said Solomon Hsiang, an economist at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the study.

The analysis is not the first to calculate the costs of global warming and the benefits of curtailing emissions. There have been numerous prior attempts, including a 2006 report commissioned by the British government that found unmitigated warming could reduce global gross domestic product by as much as 20%.

Many more have followed, but all reach the same general conclusion, said Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists: “The cost of inaction is really high, and [the cost of] reducing emissions pales in comparison.”

What sets the new study apart, she said, is its astonishing level of detail. It explores how 22 different impacts of climate change — from rising sea levels to longer pollen seasons to the economic prospects of ski resorts — will play out across the nation.

“There are no regions that escape some mix of adverse impacts,” wrote authors Jeremy Martinich and Allison Crimmins.

The findings clash with the views of President Trump and many of his appointees, who have repeatedly downplayed the risks of climate change. The EPA did not make the study authors available for interviews.

The report summarizes years of work by scores of scientists as part of the EPA’s Climate Change Impact and Risk Analysis. […]

“The climate may be one of the largest economic assets this nation holds,” Hsiang said. “We should manage it with the seriousness and clarity of thought that we would apply to managing any asset that generates trillions of dollars in value.” [more]

From ruined bridges to dirty air, EPA scientists price out the cost of climate change

ABSTRACT: There is a growing capability to project the impacts and economic effects of climate change across multiple sectors. This information is needed to inform decisions regarding the diversity and magnitude of future climate impacts and explore how mitigation and adaptation actions might affect these risks. Here, we summarize results from sectoral impact models applied within a consistent modelling framework to project how climate change will affect 22 impact sectors of the United States, including effects on human health, infrastructure and agriculture. The results show complex patterns of projected changes across the country, with damages in some sectors (for example, labour, extreme temperature mortality and coastal property) estimated to range in the hundreds of billions of US dollars annually by the end of the century under high emissions. Inclusion of a large number of sectors shows that there are no regions that escape some mix of adverse impacts. Lower emissions, and adaptation in relevant sectors, would result in substantial economic benefits.

Climate damages and adaptation potential across diverse sectors of the United States