Monday, September 22, 2014

Forget the national debt. The new budget threat is climate change

Shaun Donovan gave his first speech as White House budget director Friday, and he didn't even mention that Washington obsession of recent years, the $17.8 trillion national debt. No, in the run-up to next week's United Nations climate summit in New York, the Obama administration is focused like a laser on a different threat to federal finances and the U.S. economy: the consequences of global warming. "From where I sit, climate action is a must do; climate inaction is a can’t do; and climate denial scores – and I don’t mean scoring points on the board. I mean that it scores in the budget. Climate denial will cost us billions of dollars," Donovan said before a friendly crowd at the liberal Center for American Progress. "The failure to invest in climate solutions and climate preparedness doesn’t get you membership in a Fiscal Conservatives’ Caucus – it makes you a member of the Flat Earth Society," Donovan continued. "The costs of climate change add up and ignoring the problem only makes it worse." What is Donovan talking about? The White House has yet to do a particularly thorough job of translating the risk into cold, hard budget facts, but they've taken stab at it. So let's go to the numbers: 1) Research suggests that if warming reaches 3° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, instead of an international target of 2°, global output could suffer by roughly 0.9 percent. In the United States, that would amount to whacking GDP by roughly $150 billion a year. And as we all learned during the Great Recession, "even a small reduction in real GDP growth can dramatically reduce Federal revenue, drive up our deficits, and impact the government’s ability to serve the public," Donovan said...more


If they can't scare you enough with environmental damage, then they'll scare you with economic damage while going after the chamber of commerce types. 

1 comment:

Jefferson Piedmont said...

"The White House is not just blowing smoke. The independent, nonpartisan General Accounting Office -- which exists to monitor government spending -- last year added climate change to its high-risk list, saying the effects "will result in increased fiscal exposure for the federal government in many areas," including damage to federal property and infrastructure, claims on federal insurance programs and increased disaster relief."