When most Americans – including a frustrating percentage of elected officials — are asked about what they see as the issue that poses the greatest threat to our nation’s fiscal and economic wellbeing, the chances are high they will guess wrong.
The current national electoral debate makes this unfortunate, if not terribly surprising, situation painfully clear. In campaign ad after campaign ad, we’re told the biggest threat we face is immigration, or crime, or inflation, or maybe China.
Rarely, if ever, do our leaders muster the courage to speak the hard truth about the underlying issue whose potential human, economic and fiscal impacts dwarf all others.
Ready or not, however, North Carolinians and millions of others throughout the southeastern U.S. will receive another powerful reminder about this giant and massively expensive elephant in the room this week when a major tropical storm inundates their communities with what meteorologists are fearful could be “catastrophic” rainfall.
Hurricane/Tropical Storm Debby – the fourth of what’s expected to be an extremely busy season — crashed into the Florida coastline on Monday and is expected to spend the next several days drenching Georgia and the Carolinas. At this writing, there was still hope that the storm’s impacts might not be as bad as feared, but the likelihood of “historic” rainfall and flooding were very high.
And sadly, as countless scientists and other experts and analysts have documented for many years, the bitter reality is that storms like Debby (and the massive tax they impose on all of us) are becoming an ever more common feature of our rapidly warming planet.
Can one say for certain that any particular storm is a byproduct of climate change? No, of course not. But what scientists do say loudly and without equivocation is that global warming is making extreme hurricanes and other tropical systems (not to mention other problematic climate phenomena like thunderstorm outbreaks, droughts, and even winter snowstorms) more frequent.
And as is the case with so many societal problems that get more expensive the longer we wait to address them, the costs of climate change and its impact are mounting quickly.
North Carolina has spent billions of public dollars in recent years cleaning up the aftermath of severe weather and it seems all but certain that we’ll be spending lots more in the days and weeks ahead. Meanwhile, private expenditures – for things like soaring insurance rates, higher food prices resulting from crop losses, and the general economic pressures brought on by mass migration and competition for land and resources – will continue to be rise.
Indeed, as AP reported, a study released in April by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research estimated that the total hit to the global economy will amount to $38 trillion by mid-century.
And if worrisome facts like this feel a little overwhelming and hard to wrap one’s arms around, a recent study commissioned by the good people at Consumer Reports makes things a little more tangible. It found that “If humanity does not act swiftly to limit it, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over the course of their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.”
In short, the effective tax that the climate emergency will impose on all of us in the years ahead is likely to make the kinds of traditional taxes and expenditures that most people and politicians spend lots of time obsessing over, look laughably minuscule by comparison.
And yet, remarkably and thankfully, all hope is not yet lost. With aggressive action to end our addiction to fossil fuels and rethink and strengthen public infrastructure and conservation — actions that will cost only a tiny percentage of what we stand to lose if we fail to act – the crisis can be made significantly less dire.
The Consumer Reports study determined that if the world moves rapidly toward a “low emissions scenario” in which CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere peak around 2080 and decline after that, the future looks much brighter.
The trick here is that people will have to pay somewhat higher taxes of the traditional kind to cover the cost of the public investments necessary to effect such a rapid transition. But the effective savings per person will be truly massive. The report says we can pare the overall lifetime losses per person down to $200,000 with a concomitant tax increase of about $5,200 per person. A goodly number of people will even break even or come out ahead.
It is, in short, the old “pay me now or pay me much more later” scenario on steroids.
One can only hope it’s a truth that our elected leaders and political candidates spend a lot of time seriously contemplating this week as they watch Debby pummel the southeast and prepare to issue their inevitable pleas for assistance and declarations of emergency.
This column was originally published in NC Newsline, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
