By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
You probably wouldn’t set $87 trillion on fire to save $1 trillion. But then again, you probably aren’t Administrator Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency.
The now ironically named agency announced plans on Tuesday to renounce its 2009 finding that greenhouse-gas emissions are a danger to the public that need regulation. As I wrote earlier, this plan not only mocks established science, it also appears to be illegal, given the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA establishing the basis for this “endangerment finding,” along with Congress writing the idea into law several times in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
But we seem to live in an era of legal Calvinball, where laws and precedents are mere suggestions that can be changed as we go along. Zeldin has said as much about that Supreme Court ruling. And lawsuits over the EPA’s action might give Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dissent in that ruling, the chance to write a majority opinion overturning it.
So if we can’t appeal to law to stop this dangerous decision, then maybe we can appeal to math and economics. On a conservative podcast on Tuesday, Zeldin claimed doing away with the EPA’s endangerment finding was “an economic issue” and promised it would result in “over a trillion dollars in savings” by freeing companies from the shackles of regulation.
Zeldin hasn’t yet produced a detailed accounting of that $1 trillion figure, and I would be shocked to learn such a thing actually exists. But even if you assume for argument’s sake his figure is correct, then you have to weigh that promised savings against the staggering costs.
The economic damage of U.S. companies’ carbon emissions alone will amount to a blistering $87 trillion through 2050, according to a recent estimate by researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. That’s about three times the size of U.S. gross domestic product. And that $87 trillion is a pretty hefty undercount; only four U.S. companies make the top 25 of the Carbon Majors league tables of the world’s biggest carbon polluters, produced by the United Kingdom nonprofit InfluenceMap.
How do carbon emissions turn into economic losses? An atmosphere heated up by greenhouse gases is a more chaotic one. That means hurricanes and other storms become stronger faster, leading to greater loss of life and health and damage to property and infrastructure.
The under-insurance of U.S. homes to wildfires and floods alone could amount to $2.7 trillion in potential losses, by one estimate, nearly tripling Zeldin’s $1 trillion all by itself. Disaster cleanup has cost the U.S. economy $6.6 trillion in the past 12 years, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, dwarfing the impact of the Great Depression.
And that’s not all. A hotter planet erodes public health and productivity as heat worsens the effects of chronic diseases and allergies and lets infectious ones spread more widely. Water becomes scarce in some places and destructively abundant in others. Agriculture becomes more difficult in wide swaths of the planet. Mass migration and resource wars ensue.
The world already suffered $28 trillion in climate damage between 1991 and 2020, according to a recent study by Dartmouth College and Stanford University researchers in the journal Nature. During much of that time, the planet hadn’t yet warmed to 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial averages. Now we’re at 1.3C of warming and on a path to hit 2C, possibly in little more than a decade.
A study last year in the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that every 1C of warming reduced global GDP by 12 percent, or roughly $12 trillion every year, growing to $24 trillion or more as we hit 2C. The researchers from Stanford and Northwestern University drily concluded that “unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.”
A global decarbonization policy might cost far more than Zeldin’s mere trillion-dollar figure; possibly $192 trillion by 2050, according to BloombergNEF. Considering the heavy costs of doing nothing, even that amount is still a bargain.
But the slower we are to take action, and the more Zeldin and President Trump undo climate progress, the higher the costs will grow and the harder the damage will be to reverse. That trillion dollars gets less significant by the hour.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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