My newest column in the Midland Daily News dropped this week.
The advantage of messaging in a local paper is that most folks in the heartland don’t pay attention to the New York Times or Washington Post, and local papers get a readership that is otherwise hard to reach, and in many cases have more credibility.
Also allows for social media sharing, so feel free.
Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News (gift link):
While climate change for many people evokes images of polar bears, melting glaciers, floods and fires in far-off places, the most immediate and devastating impacts for Americans may be in their bank accounts.
One recent example of climate’s potential economic impacts came from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who pointed to increasing costs for insuring homes and cars due to climate-amplified weather extremes, which Powell said would be a continuing driver of inflation in coming decades. The New York Times confirmed this in a recent report showing home insurers were unprofitable in 18 states last year, largely due to costly and damaging extreme weather – forcing large increases in insurance rates.
Michigan is one of the states getting hit with annual double-digit increases in home insurance rates, largely due to increasing storm damages.
In a new study, Consumer Reports estimates that for an American child born in 2024, climate change could mean as much as $500,000 to $1 million over a lifetime in increased costs and reduced earnings.
According to the research, the biggest hit would be housing-related, from increasing maintenance costs to insurance costs.
The next largest impact is on food prices, due to changes in precipitation patterns and the impact of extreme weather on farms and supply chains. While some regions may benefit, models consistently predict an overall negative effect on food production.
Research from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research estimates that by 2050, damage to global gross domestic product, including farming, infrastructure, productivity and health care, will cost the world $38 trillion per year.
For comparison, the current total global GDP is $100 trillion.
According to the Associated Press, the report found that “weather and climate shocks will cause the cost of food to rise 1.5 to 1.8 percentage points annually within a decade or so, even higher in already hot places like the Middle East.”
That assumes global emissions of heat-trapping gases can be brought under control. Without a rapid transition to clean energy, these impacts will be more severe.
One source of rising costs will be the need to upgrade infrastructure in the face of changing weather patterns.
Here in Midland County, for example, we are looking at $58 million in new state and federal taxpayer dollars to shore up flood control infrastructure in coming decades.
The problem also has national security implications.
For instance, naval bases, for obvious reasons, are built at sea level and under increasing stress from climate-driven rising oceans.
At Norfolk Naval base in Virginia, sea level rise plus sinking land surface have made the ocean level 1 and a half feet higher today than when the base was established a century ago, and rising an inch every six years. Critical piers that supply power and heat to naval vessels docked there are being replaced at 100 million dollars each.
And it’s not just the Navy.
Also at risk are everything from Marine Corps bases Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and Quantico in Virginia, to Veterans Administration hospitals, to the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida — federal facilities worth at least $387 billion.
Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hegel noted a decade ago that climate change is a “Threat Multiplier,” and that “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict … They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”
On Texas’ Gulf Coast, since 2008, when Hurricane Ike caused $30 billion in damages,mostly from flooding, local government and business leaders (including Dow Chemical, which has large and vulnerable facilities in the area) have been advocating for a massive publicly funded barrier system to protect the Houston ship channel and surroundings from storms made increasingly disruptive by sea level rise.
This spring, Congress approved initial funding for the enormous “Ike Dike” project,expected to eventually cost $58 billion, mostly from federal taxpayers.
Ironically, much of the infrastructure to be protected belongs to the fossil fuel industry, which continues to be a major driver of the underlying global changes through releases of heat trapping carbon dioxide.
None of these projections would account for “black swan” disruptive climate events, such as a shutdown of the North Atlantic Current, a crucial component of a vast interconnected system that mankind has come to regard as “normal” for the last 10,000 years in which civilization has arisen.
In that event, which several recent papers suggest is more likely than once thought, all bets would be off.
Humanity would face a future totally without a roadmap and without precedent in human experience.