A new bipartisan report just released forecasts economic costs in the billions of dollars and major disruption for the United States as a result of climate change.
Annual property losses from hurricanes and other coastal storms of $35 billion; a decline in crop yields of 14 per cent, costing corn and wheat farmers tens of billions of dollars; heat wave-driven demand for electricity costing utility customers up to $12 billion per year.
Reuters Newsagency reports these are among the economic costs that climate change is expected to exact in the US over the next 25 years.
The bipartisan report says that’s just for starters: the price tag could soar to hundreds of billions by 2100.
The report was commissioned by a group chaired by former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs head Henry Paulson, and environmentalist and financier Tom Steyer.
Climatologist Professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University hailed the analysis as “the most detailed ever of the potential economic effects of climate change on the US.”
Reuters reports the study lands three weeks after President Barack Obama ordered US regulators to take their strongest steps ever to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including requiring power plants to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Titled Risky Business, the report projects climate impacts at scales as small as individual counties.
Its conclusions about crop losses and other consequences are based not on computer projections, which climate-change sceptics routinely attack, but on data from past heat waves.
Reuters reports it paints a grim picture of economic loss.
“Our economy is vulnerable to an overwhelming number of risks from climate change,” Mr Paulson said in a statement.
Those risks included from sea level rise and from heat waves that will cause deaths, reduce labour productivity and strain power grids.
By mid-century, $66 billion to $106 billion worth of coastal property will likely be below sea level.
There is a five per cent chance that by 2100 the losses will reach $700 billion, with average annual losses from rising oceans of $42 billion to $108 billion along the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf of Mexico.
Extreme heat, especially in the Southwest, Southeast and upper Midwest, will slash labour productivity, as people are unable to work outdoors at construction and other jobs for sustained periods.
The analysis goes further than previous work, said Princeton’s Professor Oppenheimer, by identifying places that will be “unsuited for outdoor activity.”
Demand for electricity will surge, as people need air-conditioning just to survive, straining generation and transmission capacity.
Reuters reports the study says that will likely require the construction of up to 95 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity over the next five to 25 years, or roughly 200 average-size coal or natural gas power plants.
As utilities add the construction costs to customers’ bills, people and businesses will pay $8.5 billion to $30 billion more every year by the middle of the century.
The report does not make policy prescriptions, concluding only “it is time for all American business leaders and investors to get in the game and rise to the challenge of addressing climate change.”