Republicans who support federal action to combat climate change hope dire economic projections from a new government report could help rebut skeptics’ main argument: Intervention will cost too much.
“Of course, being able to move climate change from polar bears to dollars and cents is important for policymakers,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy for Niskanen Center, told the Washington Examiner. “I doubt many members of Congress want to be callous about the plight of the polar bear, but many want to make sure American keeps growing sustainably.”
Friday’s National Climate Assessment, prepared by 13 federal government agencies and required by Congress, says if no major climate change policy happens soon, the damage of global warming will shrink the U.S. economy by 10 percent by 2100.
“It’s important to recognize that climate change is an economic issue, not just an environmental one,” Josiah Neeley, energy policy director at the right-of-center R Street Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
The report says that no sector of the economy will be unaffected by climate change, projecting in a worst-case scenario that labor-related losses caused by extreme heat could total $155 billion annually by 2090, while coastal property damage from sea level rise could reach $118 billion.
“With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” the report said.
Andrew Light, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, told the Washington Examiner that the authors of the climate assessment, which was completed by about 300 scientists, did not deliberately focus on economic costs to persuade skeptics.
But he said studies explaining the economic harms of climate change are getting more rigorous, as scientists have become better at attributing at least some part of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and wildfires, to climate change.
For example, the report projects that the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season alone caused more than $250 billion in damages.
It also determines that the area burned by wildfires across the western U.S. from 1984 to 2015 was twice what would have burned had climate change not occurred, because of drier and warmer conditions.
The report says these near-term effects mean the U.S. government, and states and localities, should be considering spending billions of dollars on bolstering climate change adaptation, or ways to limit the effects of rising sea levels and higher floodwaters, by building flood walls and toughening development standards, for example.
“I am skeptical that even the economics will make a dent in any Republican decision-making process, primarily because the big numbers show up at the end of the century,” Gary Yohe, a professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the report, told the Washington Examiner. “What’s more compelling is the economic damages of what’s happening now and how much of that cost can be attributed to climate change.”
But changing the terms of the climate debate to reflect worsening costs could boost the persuasiveness of Republicans who are already inclined to act, such as GOP members of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus.
“Republicans who don’t want to address the issue will not be convinced or converted,” Shane Skelton, a former energy policy staffer for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., told the Washington Examiner. “But, those that do want to address it now have a better opportunity to make a strong case for climate action in a language that Republican voters and business interests like to speak.”
President Trump and some Republican senators are already responding to the report skeptically.
Trump said Monday he doubted the report’s economic findings, saying, “I don’t believe it.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “all of the proposals I’ve seen so far” would harm the U.S. economy.
Lee and Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., emphasized innovation as the key to addressing climate change and downplayed prospects for a major government solution.
“Right now, you don’t hear a lot of [people] offering constructive, innovative solutions for the future, it’s usually just a lot of alarmism,” Sasse said on Fox News Sunday.
Republican and free-market supporters of climate change action say there are already fiscally responsible bigger policy proposals.
“We can reduce pollution and keep the economy going,” Christine Todd Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush administration, told the Washington Examiner. “If we don’t address the pollution, we won’t have an economy.”
For example, many economists say a carbon emissions tax is the most cost-effective way to fight climate change.
While such a policy remains far off in Congress, Democratic and Republican lawmakers will introduce the first bipartisan carbon tax bill in a decade as soon as this week.
The bill, to be introduced by Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida, the Democratic co-chairman of the Climate Solutions Caucus, along with two Republicans, is intended as a testing ground for a carbon-fee-and-dividend model that distributes the revenue from the tax to American households to protect them from higher energy costs.
Free-market groups have been promoting this approach in recent months, with the backing of some oil and gas companies, viewing it as the most realistic way for Republicans to come on board.
“Everyone agrees innovation is great,” Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told the Washington Examiner. “The best way to harness private investment dollars into the type of innovations that reduce emissions is to a put price on carbon.”
Kaufman said that Republicans such as Lee and Sasse are unrealistic to expect a climate change policy that would inflict no short-term cost.
“If you looking for a policy that will be unambiguously positive for the U.S. economy, in all years, you are putting up a standard that no reasonable policy will meet,” he said.
