Climate 411

This post is by Jackie Roberts, director of sustainable technologies at Environmental Defense Fund.

Shifting to a low-carbon economy means creating renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. This will take a lot of work, but in a good sense. We’ll see increased investment, new businesses, and new products to manufacture — the creation of many new jobs.

The ball won’t start rolling in earnest until the U.S. passes cap-and-trade legislation, but movement has already started. For example, check out this map we created of green businesses and their suppliers in Ohio:

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

A new report by researchers at Tufts University (commissioned by NRDC) presents two ways of estimating the costs of inaction on climate change. Both lead to staggering totals – far more than the cost of addressing the problem:

New research shows that if present trends continue, the total cost of global warming will be as high as 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Four global warming impacts alone – hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs – will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.

This report on the cost of inaction is a good companion to our own report on the low cost of an effective policy to fight climate change.

This post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., director of economic policy and analysis at Environmental Defense Fund.

Last Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sponsored a panel discussion on the economic impact of climate change legislation. I was on the panel, along with Bob Shackleton of Congressional Budget Office, Francisco de la Chesnaye of Environmental Protection Agency, Margo Thorning of American Council for Capital Formation, and Anne Smith of CRA International.

In responding to questions about my recent study of how climate legislation will impact the economy, I made two key points:

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This post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense Fund.

We just released a new report on how climate change legislation will impact the economy [PDF]. There have been many recent cost estimates, but ours provides something unique. To put the numbers in perspective, we looked at model projections in the context of government data on jobs, consumer expenditures, electricity consumption, and so on.

The models – all from highly respected, independent sources – don’t agree on much. But they do agree on one thing: the overall impact on the economy will be very small.  All the models project that, over the next twenty years, the cost of climate policy will be just a few months of economic growth.

The good news coming out of this study is that we can afford ambitious cuts in global warming pollution.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

A new fact sheet on costs to U.S. transportation and infrastructure surveys the many ways that global warming will cause disruption and damage if we don’t act to stop it.

Published by the Democratic Policy Committee, the fact sheet gives examples of known costs in different areas to give a sense of what the total might be – and it’s big. Here are just a few examples from the transportation sector:

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