There will be no bargains with an overheating climate. The $3.5 trillion price tag that President Joe Biden proposed for his climate-heavy Build Back Better Act might seem enormous. But over the long term, it will be a pittance. By zeroing in on that number, the public debate seems to have skipped right over the economic ramifications of climate change, which promise to be historically disruptive — and enormously expensive. What we don’t spend now will cost us much more later. Some economists and climate scientists have calculated that climate change could cost the United States the equivalent of nearly 4% of its gross domestic product a year by 2100. The Build Back Better Act proposes several hundred billion dollars a year for the next 10 years be used to slash emissions by cleaning up electricity generation and making electric vehicles commonplace, among other things. Any one of the spending packages under consideration in Congress is likely to pay for itself quickly, climate scientists say. Taken as a whole, much of the $3.5 trillion starts to look more like a down payment — an investment in keeping the planet, and the U.S. economy and standard of living, as close as possible to the way it is now.
By Abrahm Lustgarten. ProPublica. October 28, 2021.
