Climate change damages US economy, increases inequality
Rutgers University
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| Make America great again, like the 1930s Dustbowl? |
Unmitigated climate
change will make the United States poorer and more unequal, according to a new
study. The poorest third of counties could sustain economic damages costing as
much as 20 percent of their income if warming proceeds unabated.
Unmitigated climate
change will make the United States poorer and more unequal, according to a new
study published in the journal Science. The poorest third of
counties could sustain economic damages costing as much as 20 percent of their income
if warming proceeds unabated.
States in the South
and lower Midwest, which tend to be poor and hot already, will lose the most,
with economic opportunity traveling northward and westward. Colder and richer
counties along the northern border and in the Rockies could benefit the most as
health, agriculture and energy costs are projected to improve.
"Unmitigated
climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United
States," said Hsiang, Chancellor's Associate Professor of Public Policy at
UC Berkeley. "If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates
it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in
the country's history."
The pioneering study
may settle the debate over whether climate change will help or hurt the U.S.
economy, being the first to use state-of-the-art statistical methods and 116
climate projections developed by scientists around the world to price the
impacts of climate change the way the insurance industry or an investor would,
comparing risks and rewards.
The team of economists
and climate scientists computed the real-world costs and benefits: how
agriculture, crime, health, energy demand, labor and coastal communities will
be affected by higher temperatures, changing rainfall, rising seas and
intensifying hurricanes.
"In the absence
of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast
will take a massive hit," said Kopp, a professor of Earth and Planetary
Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
"Its exposure to
sea-level rise -- made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes -- poses a
major risk to its communities. Increasingly extreme heat will drive up violent
crime, slow down workers, amp up air conditioning costs, and threaten people's
lives."
If emissions growth is
not slowed, then the resulting 6-10°F (3-5°C) of warming above 19th century
levels projected for the last two decades of this century will have costs on
par with the Great Recession -- except they will not go away afterwards and
damages for poor regions will be many times larger.
"The 'hidden
costs' of carbon dioxide emissions are no longer hidden, since now we can see
them clearly in the data," said Jina, a postdoctoral scholar in the
department of economics at the University of Chicago.
"The emissions
coming out of our cars and power plants are reshaping the American economy.
Here in the Midwest, we may see agricultural losses similar to the Dustbowl of
the 1930s."
The study is the first
of its kind to price warming using data and evidence accumulated by the
research community over decades.
From this data, the
team estimates that for each one degree Fahrenheit (0.55°C) increase in global
temperatures, the U.S. economy loses about 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product,
with each degree of warming costing more than the last.
This metric can help
the country manage climate change as it does other systematic economic risks --
for example, the way the Federal Reserve uses interest rates to manage the risk
of recession.
"We could not
have done this study without the ongoing revolution in big data and
computing," said Rising, a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UC
Berkeley, describing the 29,000 simulations of the national economy run for the
project.
"For the first
time in history, we can use these tools to peer ahead into the future. We are
making decisions today about the kinds of lives we and our children want to
lead. Had the computing revolution come twenty years later, we wouldn't be able
to see the economic hole we're digging for ourselves."