A new report from the Obama administration warns of rising death counts and other disastrous consequences from inaction on climate change.
When compared with a “future with unchecked climate change,” taking action to curb manmade global warming would avoid nearly 13,000 deaths by 2050, and 57,000 deaths by 2100 from poor air quality, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
“This report shows us how costly inaction will be to Americans’ health, our environment and our society,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in the administration’s latest reason for taking action on climate change.
“But more importantly, it helps us understand the magnitude of benefits to a number of sectors in the U.S. with global climate action,” McCarthy added.
The report, “Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action,” examines two scenarios — action vs. inaction — that essentially makes an economic argument for deploying more renewable energy and other actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the next century.
For example, the report says “in a future without greenhouse gas reductions, estimated damages from sea-level rise and storm surge to coastal property in the lower 48 states are $5.0 trillion through 2100.” The costs would be diverted through actions that reduce the warming trend through the middle of the century, according to the EPA.
The report also emphasizes the need to come to a “global” agreement to reduce the emissions, which many scientists say are to blame for manmade global warming, resulting in more severe weather, heat waves, droughts and flooding.
The global agreement it alludes to is the meeting of the United Nations in Paris at the end of the year, where global leaders will try to hash out an agreement on emission reductions to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius.
If the Earth’s temperature, instead of falling, continues to rise by another 2 degrees, the consequences of sea level rise and other effects would be calamitous, say scientists and the Obama administration.
“We can save tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, annually in the United States by the end of this century, but the sooner we act, the better off America and future generations of Americans will be,” McCarthy said.
The new climate report “compares two future scenarios,” according to EPA. It examines a future where “significant global action” has been taken to combat climate change, curbing global warming by 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It then compares that scenario to one in which “no action on climate change” is taken, resulting in a global temperature rise of 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The report then quantifies the differences in health, infrastructure and ecosystem impacts under the two scenarios, producing estimates of the costs of inaction and the benefits of reducing global [greenhouse gas] emissions,” according to the EPA.
