Americans Will Pay Billions More For Climate Change, and That’s the Best Case
A grim U.S. government assessment of global warming’s economic impact gives a whole new meaning to Black Friday.
A neighborhood decimated by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California.
Photographer: The Washington Post/The Washington PostThe Trump administration just published a major report documenting the advance of climate change, weeks earlier than expected and on a day many Americans are occupied with family and holiday shopping. The news is predictably bad, but this time the tally comes with a pricetag—one significantly larger than you’ll find at the mall.
The report catalogs the observed damage and accelerating financial losses projected for a climate now unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability. The result is that much of what humans have built, and many of the things they are building now, are unsuited to the world as it exists. And as time goes on, the added cost of living in that world could total hundreds of billions of dollars—annually.