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.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
"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."
Post a Comment