{"id":48376,"date":"2017-10-24T05:56:44","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T05:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=48376"},"modified":"2017-10-24T05:56:44","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T05:56:44","slug":"congressional-auditor-urges-action-address-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/congressional-auditor-urges-action-address-climate-change.html","title":{"rendered":"Congressional Auditor Urges Action to Address Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congressional Auditor Urges Action to Address Climate Change<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Congressional Auditor Urges Action to Address Climate Change: Fires, floods and hurricanes are already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year and climate change will drive those costs ever higher in coming years, a new federal study warns.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress\u2019s auditing arm, urges the Trump administration to take climate change risks seriously and begin formulating a response.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study, scheduled to be released Tuesday, says that different sectors of the economy and different parts of the country will be harmed in ways that are difficult to predict. But one estimate projects that rising temperatures could cause losses in labor productivity of as much as $150 billion by 2099, while changes in some crop yields could cost as much as $53 billion. The Southwest will suffer more costly wildfires, the Southeast will see more heat-related deaths and the Northwest must prepare for diminished shellfish harvests.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report acknowledges that it is difficult to pinpoint the costs of disasters that can be directly attributed to climate change. And the projected fiscal burden remains less than 1 percent of the current $3.8 trillion federal budget.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Senators Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who jointly requested the report, said between the lines of a conservative government audit was an urgent economic message that Washington should heed.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Government Accountability Office \u2014 if you will, the chief bean counter \u2014 is basically telling us that this is costing us a lot of money,\u201d Ms. Cantwell said. \u201cWe need to understand that as stewards of the taxpayer that climate is a fiscal issue, and the fact that it\u2019s having this big a fiscal impact on our federal budget needs to be dealt with.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The report, two years in the making, comes as the Senate prepares to vote this week on a $36.5 billion disaster-relief package to fund hurricane relief, a flood insurance program and wildfire recovery efforts in the West.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Cantwell and Ms. Collins noted that the White House Office of Management and Budget had calculated that extreme weather events over the past decade cost the federal government $350 billion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both asserted that the study should help move Congress and the administration past partisan fights over the science of global warming and toward a search for solutions \u2014 something they said could be problematic given that the Trump administration is rolling back many of former President Barack Obama\u2019s climate change initiatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is the administration will take a look at this report and realize there is an economic impact here that is significant,\u201d Ms. Collins said. \u201cWe simply cannot afford the billions of dollars in additional funding that\u2019s going to be needed if we do not take into account the consequences of climate change.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The G.A.O. study draws on interviews with 26 scientific and economic experts and 30 studies, though it focuses most heavily on the only two national-scale studies analyzing the economic effects of climate change. One of them is an ongoing research project being produced by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the other is a study by several organizations led by the Rhodium Group that analyzed the potential costs associated with climate change in coastal property, health, agriculture, energy, labor productivity and crime.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trevor Houser, a partner at the Rhodium Group, which led the American Climate Prospectus study, said the accounting was on the conservative side. The agriculture analysis, for example, looked only at how changes in temperature and precipitation would affect four commodity crops. It did not study the fiscal fallout of events like wildfires and did not take into account the costs of infectious diseases linked to climate change.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cClimate change is clear and present danger to the U.S. economy and the fiscal health of the U.S. government, and that risk is really unevenly spread,\u201d Mr. Houser said. \u201cIt needs to be actively managed by the federal government.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

J. Alfredo Gomez, one of the lead authors of the G.A.O. study, said the federal government had identified climate change as a significant economic risk since 2013. This study, he said, asks the administration to use the detailed data to prepare for the inevitable.<\/span><\/p>\n

Robert N. Stavins, an economist at Harvard University, said he doubted the study would convince either Republicans in Congress or the White House to act.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe G.A.O. study is conservative, it\u2019s not alarmist, it\u2019s realistic and balanced and they go out of their way to point out all of the uncertainties involved,\u201d Mr. Stavins said. \u201cI don\u2019t see any likelihood it\u2019s going to be taken seriously.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/10\/23\/climate\/gao-climate-change-cost.html<\/span><\/p>\n

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