Climate change could cost US budget $2 trillion a year end century: White House
Flood, fire, and drought fueled climate change could take a massive bite out of the US federal budget per year the end of the century, the White House said in its first-ever such assessment on Sunday.
The Office of Management and Budget assessment, tasked President Joe Biden last May, found the upper range of climate change’s hit to the budget the end of the century could total 7.1% annual revenue loss, equal to $2 trillion a year in today’s dollars.
“Climate change threatens communities and sectors across the country, including through floods, drought, extreme heat, wildfires, and hurricanes (affecting) the US economy and the lives of everyday Americans,” Candace Vahlsing, an OMB climate and science official, and its chief econom Danny Yagan, said in a blog seen Reuters ahead of publication on Monday. “Future damages could dwarf current damages if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.”
The analysis found that the federal government could spend an additional $25 billion to $128 billion annually on expenditures such as coastal disaster relief, flood, crop, and healthcare insurance, wildfire suppression and flooding at federal facilities.
Just last year, a record heatwave and drought in the US West gave rise to two massive wildfires that tore through California and Oregon and were among the largest in the hory of both states.
The severe drought that has gripped parts of the US West since mid-2020 is likely to pers or worsen this spring due, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminration said in March.
US military bases, including Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and Tyndall Air Force base in Florida, have suffered billions of dollars in damage in recent years from floods and hurricanes.
The OMB said increased wildfires could boost federal fire suppression costs between $1.55 billion to $9.6 billion annually. Nearly 12,200 federal buildings and structures could be flooded as seas rise with replacement costs of nearly $44 billion.Absent policies and actions to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, world temperatures are on pace to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels the end of the century.
The grim OMB assessment came hours before publication of a long-awaited UN climate science panel report on methods of curbing the emissions, a report that some scients say may downplay certain potentially devastating scenarios due to its consensual nature in which 195 governments had to sign off on it.
Biden, a Democrat who positioned himself as a champion for tackling climate change when he took office in January 2021, has been forced to support hiked domestic oil drilling and liquefied natural gas exports to Europe as Russia’s war on Ukraine spikes energy inflation.
The president’s “Build Back Better” bill, which contained hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to fight climate change and support clean energy, has been stalled in the narrowly-divided Senate Republicans and West Virginia’s conservative Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, the founder and partial owner of a private coal brokerage.
Biden late last month submitted a $5.8 trillion budget plan to Congress with a focus on deficit reduction in an apparent overture to Manchin has said he could not vote for the bill because it would worsen deficits. Biden’s budget plan calls for nearly $45 billion to tackle climate change in fiscal year 2023, an increase of nearly 60% over fiscal year 2021.
