CLIMATE CHALLENGESHow the Trump administration’s climate math doesn’t add up
There’s an old argument that protecting the environment hurts the economy. It’s wrong for a lot of reasons.
When President Donald Trump talks about climate change, he often recycles one well-known, shaky argument: that doing anything about it will be a financial disaster. After pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, he said it was costing the U.S.“trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying.” He’s also said that President Joe Biden’s plan to boost electric vehicles threatened the auto industry with “economic destruction” (before Trump “saved” the industry by reversing it, of course). Trump has tried to scare other countries into following suit, telling world leaders last year, “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
If you look at the Trump administration’s justification for scrapping environmental protections, it always comes back to money. Officials justify these moves with estimates that almost always avoid or downplay the stunning costs of letting climate change continue unchecked, even as extreme weather brings the risk into focus. A record-breaking spring heat wave scorched the Western U.S. at the end of March, worsening wildfire forecasts and threatening the snowpack that’s crucial for the region’s water supplies. The costs are already hitting home: An analysis from the Brookings Institution in September found that the effects of climate change, from rising insurance rates to the health threats from wildfire smoke, are costing the average American household between $219 and $571 a year, depending on how much bad weather you attribute directly to climate change. For some households, the costs exceeded $1,000 a year.
It’s clear that taking action to prevent such disasters doesn’t hurt the economy as a whole, said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, but it does hurt some industries — namely, oil companies. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been promoting the story that taking action on climate change is too costly. “There is this prevailing narrative out there, and I guess what I would say is that this is not by accident,” Wagner said. In the early 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute began commissioning economists to produce research that made any effort to rein in greenhouse gases appear prohibitively expensive. One industry-funded study in 1991 calculated that imposing a carbon tax of $200 a ton would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent by 2020. It ignored the cost of failing to act on climate change.
