Climate change cost could rise to $1 trillion during next decade
The extremes and disruptions of climate change could carry a $1 trillion price tag for America during the next decade as droughts, fires and other climate extremes accelerate, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said Monday.
Cantwell and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked in 2015 that the nonpartisan General Accounting Office do a study on costs of global warming, a task that took two years and delivered a sharply worded report last October.
"They said climate change had cost something like $625 billion over a 10-year period, which is about to go up to $1 trillion in the next decade: This is costing us real money," Cantwell said in an interview.
The GAO report came out last October, at a time when the Trump administration was planning to scrap the Obama administration's Clean Power plan and pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords.
It flagged the fact the the government had directly spent $350 billion since 2007 on extreme weather and fire events, not counting the cost of floods and hurricanes and droughts to the wider economy. Ocean acidification carries a price tag in the Northwest.
"The federal government has not undertaken strategic government-wide planning to manage climate risks by using information on the potential economic effects of climate change to identify significant risks to craft appropriate federal responses," the GAO concluded.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/Connelly-Climate-change-cost-could-rise-to-1-13153155.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletterspi&utm_term=spi
