Climate 411

This post is by Jon A. Anda, President of the Environmental Markets Network at Environmental Defense. A version of this post was published in the Financial Times on December 4, 2007.

A November 28 column by John Kay in the Financial Times, "Climate Change: the (Groucho) Marxist approach", starts with a quote from Groucho Marx: "Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?" Groucho’s position may be morally indefensible, Kay says, but "[t]he problem of weighting the present and the future equally is that there is a lot of future." From an economic standpoint, valuing future people equally would require unrealistically great sacrifices by those living today.

There’s a problem with this argument. It’s based on a rather totalitarian belief in net present value (NPV) as the means to evaluate policy – a simple calculation of the benefits of action (the cost of doing nothing) minus the costs of action. If a 5 percent discount rate applied to base-case cost and damage estimates yields a negative NPV for policy, does that mean we reject it?

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This post is by Keith Gaby, communications director for the national climate campaign at Environmental Defense.

When politicians hesitate to act on global warming, one of the concerns we hear is that cutting the pollution that causes global warming could cost too much. More and more evidence is piling up to show that’s just not true. For one, we have to take into account the cost of not doing anything.

But just as important, the cost of doing what we need to is much less than people fear. A study released today by researchers at McKinsey & Company shows how much is already in our reach.

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This post is by Gerald Karnas, Florida Climate Project Director at Environmental Defense.

Florida stands to lose big-time unless Congress enacts strong climate legislation, soon. The longer Congress delays, the harder climate change will hit Floridians. Damage to just three sectors—tourism, electric utilities, and real estate—together with hurricane damage would shrink the state’s gross domestic product by more than 5 percent by the end of this century.

That’s the key conclusion of a new report by Tufts University economists. Environmental Defense commissioned the report and is helping to launch it today via a press conference in Tallahassee.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

It’s no surprise the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the Lieberman-Warner bill (see their new ad). They’ve been one of the loudest voices against global warming action for years.

The problem is, their claim that a firm climate bill will cripple our economy is simply wrong. See our previous post on Green Technologies for a more realistic assessment of the costs. There is also a cost to inaction. A recent study by the University of Maryland found that the most expensive option is to do nothing.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

We frequently hear people worrying about the expense of tackling the global warming problem (an expense that is generally overrated). But what we don’t hear much about is the cost of inaction. How much of a burden will be placed on our economy if we do nothing?

This is the topic of a study just released by the University of Maryland (and partially funded by Environmental Defense) titled "The US Economic Impacts of Climate Change and the Costs of Inaction". The upshot? Taking no action at all is our most expensive policy option.

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