Being a climate change denier can be extremely profitable for energy companies and the politicians who love them. That’s why several energy companies have invested in spreading doubt. But climate change is becoming extremely expensive for everyone else.
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Climate change is costing taxpayers billions of dollars in disaster relief and the tab will only increase as extreme weather events become more common, according to a new government study.
The federal government has spent an estimated $350 billion over the past decade responding to extreme weather and fire events, which are exacerbated by climate change, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. It comes as Congress moves to approve billions of dollars in extra funding for hurricane relief.
With the recent series of disasters, including both hurricanes and fires, there’s been a tendency among scientists questioned to hedge around the relationship between causation and climate change with statements about how it’s difficult to connect an individual event to earth’s rising temperatures, but climate change is definitively connected to the increasing severity and frequency of events.
But what this report indicates is just that: the increase in intensity and frequency of extreme events is already costing hundreds of billions of dollars. Climate change is already destroying budgets and processes for dealing with emergencies. It’s going to continue to get worse, and it reaches into far more areas than just disaster recovery.
As climate change accelerates, it’s bankrupting the whole system we’ve built up to cushion against extreme events.
In addition to the $205 billion spent directly on disaster relief over the past decade, the government has spent $90 billion for crop and flood insurance, $34 billion for wildland fire management and $28 billion for repairs to federal facilities, according to the report.
It’s easy to say that people shouldn’t build in flood plains, but when regions have three 500-year events over the space of four years, as has happened in Houston, what constitutes a flood plain? The whole principle of insurance is to distribute relatively rare risks over a broad pool. When risks stop being rare, the cost of insurance becomes so high that it’s no longer an effective system.
Until now, the government has been dealing with each disaster as if it’s a one-off event.
The report says the government should take more preparations to deal with climate-related weather events, noting that previous GAO studies had found "the federal government had no comprehensive, strategic approach" to disaster resilience, nor did it have "strategic government-wide priorities related to climate change."
But the increasing severity and frequency of events requires a different, integrated approach. Unfortunately, the Trump White House isn’t just failing to put the required safety net into place. They’re actively unraveling what we have.