Rising costs of climate crisis must compel Congress to act

Last year, while too much of Washington dithered and danced around the urgent need for climate action, catastrophic drought, storms, floods and other weather and climate disasters resulted in $145 billion worth of damage and took 688 lives nationwide, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

These disasters directly impacted more than 40 percent of the population, from the Great Plains states to the hills of Kentucky; from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf of Mexico. Already $742.1 billion in damages have been incurred in just the past five years, and climate disasters have killed more than 4,500 people across the country.  

As staggering as they are, these figures reference only catastrophic disasters that individually cause $1 billion or more worth of damage. They don’t include ongoing losses from widening deserts and rising seas or consequences like species collapse that can’t be easily monetized. They don’t cover every drought, every storm, every wildfire or heatwave. 

Nor do these numbers account for the astronomical health costs  — more than $800 billion a year — the nation is already paying due to climate change and the toxic pollution from our reliance on the dirty fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis. 

And as the climate crisis worsens (last year brought the hottest U.S. summer on record) climate and weather disasters will grow more devastating, threatening to overwhelm our capacity to respond.

Every day we fail to act on climate, we are adding to these costs and risks — and passing them along to our children. In economic terms, we’re borrowing from the future to sustain the fuels of the past. We’re burying our children alive beneath a mountain of environmental debt from which they may never recover.

Small wonder that two-thirds of the country wants the federal government to take action. Increasingly, that support is crossing party lines. Extreme weather disasters, it turns out, don’t check the voter registration roles before striking.

It’s time to confront these growing costs and the existential peril they present. Fortunately, it’s not too late to act — but it’s far too late to dither.

The science makes clear that we must cut carbon pollution, methane releases and other greenhouse gases in half by 2030 — across the United States and around the world — to avert the most dangerous, and costly, consequences of climate change. 

President Biden has a plan to set us on track to do our part. The centerpiece is the climate action, the strongest in U.S. history, contained in the Build Back Better Act. Passed by the House in November, it’s now before the Senate. We can’t afford for the Senate to fail us. It’s time to pass the bill.

The Build Back Better Act calls for strategic investment to fight the climate crisis and its soaring costs. It will generate jobs in communities across the country. It will strengthen the economy and help create a more equitable society. 

The bill includes a record $550 billion in national investment, over 10 years, to speed the shift away from the coal, oil and gas that are driving the climate crisis and toward cleaner, smarter ways to power our future.

It starts by helping to clean up the cars, trucks and dirty power plants that together account for about two-thirds of the nation’s carbon footprint. 

The bill extends and expands tax credits to make electric cars — new and used — more affordable, especially for middle-income and lower-income drivers. That, along with new federal clean car standards finalized in December, will help the industry reach 100-percent pollution-free car sales by 2035. 

One of the cheapest and most effective ways to cut carbon pollution is to replace coal-fired electricity generation with clean, renewable power from the wind and sun, while modernizing our transmission grid and storage systems. 

The Build Back Better Act includes powerful tax incentives to accelerate wind and solar power development, including credits that can cut the cost of installing rooftop solar power systems by nearly a third. It will help families invest in home weatherization and energy-efficient appliances, saving the typical household $500 a year, on average, in utility bills. And the legislation includes incentives to make sure benefits reach low-income communities on the front lines of climate hazard and harm, as well as regions that have lost power plants, coal mines or other fossil fuel facilities. 

The Build Back Better Act is the foundation of a broader national strategy to cut greenhouse gases 50 to 52 percent by 2030. To get there, we’ll also need ambitious new carbon pollution standards at the national, state and local levels. Every federal agency must be part of the climate fix, and not the problem. And we’ll need to drive further progress through research and innovation.

The rising tide of climate costs has made it all too clear. We simply can’t afford to kick the climate can down the road any longer. It’s time to stand up to a crisis that’s costing us more each day we delay. It’s time for the Senate to pass the Build Back Better Act.

Manish Bapna is the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group with more than 3 million supporters nationwide