We're Paying Billions for Damage Linked to Climate Change

Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, according to a report released October 22 by Climate Central. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year.

More than half of the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January. Severe storms — which brought tornadoes, hail and floods to much of the country — accounted for the rest of the nationwide damage. 

The total does not include the July 4 floods that struck central Texas, killing at least 136 people. 

The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 years, the data show. Annual costs, which are inflation-adjusted using the Consumer Price Index, typically reached the tens of billions in the 1990s and rose to a high of $182.7 billion last year. 

Climate Central began overseeing the database this spring after the Trump administration directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to stop updating its database.  Adam Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years but took early retirement in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980. 

Smith is continuing the work at the nonprofit Climate Central, where he is the senior climate impacts scientist. He is using the same methodology that NOAA did and, according to New York Times reporter Scott Dance, plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data. The research relies on data from insurance companies and other sources, some of which is proprietary, to tally up total losses. “This data set was simply too important to stop being updated,” Smith told Dance. 

CNN reported that “the choice to discontinue the database was in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus on cutting climate change datasets and programs across federal agencies.” 

NOAA spokeswoman Kim Doster said that her agency ”appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound, unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation.” 

Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. The administration has created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November. 

Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate change’s effects on communities, told The Times that the database serves as a powerful signal of both changing weather extremes and “decision making that is costing us a lot of money.”

The billion-dollar-disaster list “has been one of the most effective bridges to the public communicating the increasing costs of disasters,” Rumbach said. “It’s a really powerful tool for communicating to the public this trend we see.”

Pricing carbon would be a sensible way to speed the transition away from fossil fuels and thus reduce the number of disasters and their cost.

Endangerment Finding Is Endangered

What’s next in EPA’s efforts to withdraw its 2009 Endangerment Finding, which concluded that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane from vehicles, pose a threat to public health and welfare? The finding was supported by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, affirming that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. 

EPA announced its intention in July, contending that subsequent research had “cast significant doubt” on the accuracy of the Endangerment Finding and setting a September 22 deadline for public comments. On the eve of that deadline, the Federal Register reported that EPA had received more than 140,000 comments. Now the agency must analyze them and decide its next steps.

A week before the deadline, the nation’s leading scientific advisory body issued a major report contradicting the administration’s claims and marshaling the strongest evidence to date that carbon dioxide, methane and other planet-warming greenhouse gases are threatening human health. The report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, concludes that the original endangerment finding was accurate and “has stood the test of time.” It says that there is now even stronger evidence that rising greenhouse gas levels can threaten public health and well-being, and that new risks have been uncovered. “The United States,” it said, “faces a future in which climate-induced harm continues to worsen and today’s extremes become tomorrow’s norms.”

Critics of EPA’s proposed withdrawal of the finding included 102 lawmakers, led by Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA). They wrote to EPA to urge reconsideration of its proposal. "This is a clear abdication of EPA's core mission to protect human health and the environment and a flagrant rejection of Congressional intent," the letter said.

The New York Times’ Brad Plumer reported that the EPA proposal is “one of President Donald Trump’s most significant steps yet to derail federal climate efforts. If the move is held up in court, future administrations would have no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.”

In response to the report, EPA spokeswoman Carolyn Holran, said, “The endangerment finding has been used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines. As we saw in the 16 intervening years since the endangerment finding was made, many of the extremely pessimistic predictions and assumptions E.P.A. relied upon have not materialized as expected.”

As it moves ahead, will EPA simply dismiss the National Academies’ strongly worded report? Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, told The Times, “Courts are going to be very leery if the E.P.A. tries to ignore or reject the findings of the National Academies of Sciences.”

Drought poses major threat to the food we eat

Widespread drought is “looming over what people around the world eat,” The New York Times reported recently, and “the wider societal risks of drought are drawing increasing attention.”

In the Midwest, for example, years of poor rains have led ranchers to cull cattle herds, and herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years. The result: Beef prices have climbed to their highest levels ever.

In China, one of the nation’s key wheat-producing regions, the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had its driest spring since 1931, though subsequent rains have eased concerns somewhat about its wheat and barley crops. 

Brazil, which accounts for 40 percent of global coffee cultivation, has experienced its worst drought in four decades, parching coffee farms and driving up prices worldwide. Last year hot, dry weather also hit Vietnam, the world’s second-largest coffee producer. 

The European Central Bank estimated in a study published in late May that droughts threatened to wipe out nearly 15 percent of the bloc’s economic output, with the greatest risk to agriculture in Southern Europe.

Water stress affects 30 percent of the population every year in the 27 countries of the European Union, and that is expected to worsen as the world warms, the bloc’s environmental agency said in a study. Agriculture is the biggest water user in Europe and is therefore among the sectors most vulnerable to water stress. Heat and drought is already endangering one of the most coveted crops of the Mediterranean: olives.

Corn yields dropped 70 percent across Zimbabwe, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation.  The Amazon Basin and Mexico also have been hit by drought.

Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and generating more extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky, The Times’ Somini Sengupta pointed out, as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated geographically. A report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water concluded that half the world’s food production is in areas where water availability is projected to decline.

Noting “how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, a researcher at the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), told Grist, “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.” She was the lead author of a recent report by NDMC and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

If the world’s eight billion people (or the nine billion the UN predicts for 2037) are going to have enough food to survive, we must take action to reduce the threat of droughts and other forms of extreme weather. An important part of the solution is to price carbon so that we can accelerate the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Please tell your U.S. senators and your House member to put a price on carbon.

Americans want government to protect us from climate change's impact on health

Seventy-five percent  of registered voters want federal agencies to maintain or increase their efforts to protect people from the health harms of global warming. That figure is from a recently released national survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. 

Increasingly, Americans are experiencing or reading about the threats that climate change poses to human health, so the survey results probably should not surprise us.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) concluded that climate risks are appearing faster and will become more severe sooner than previously expected, and it will be harder to adapt with increased global heating. IPCC calculated that 3.6 billion of the planet’s eight billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change.

“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5C warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat,” said Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter. He told AP’s Seth Borenstein, “Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape,”

Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. Climate change also takes a toll in ways that might not occur to us. As Maggie Astor reported in The New York Times, one recent study found that firefighters who fought the Los Angeles blazes in January had elevated lead and mercury in their blood. Scientists have also discovered that some wildfire smoke contains substances associated with chronic conditions like heart disease. 

Despite these grim realities, the Trump administration has indicated that it will stop funding research on the health effects of climate change. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in an internal document obtained by The New York Times that it was the agency’s new policy “not to prioritize” research related to climate change.

The Times’ Lisa Friedman wrote: “How does extreme heat affect Alzheimer’s patients? Do air purifiers help people suffering from chronic lung disease? What are the most cost-effective ways to protect communities from wildfire smoke and extreme heat?”

She told readers that when it canceled $450 million in NIH grants and contracts to Harvard University, the Trump administration ended those research projects, as well as dozens of others focused on the connection between climate change, the environment and public health.

The field of climate and environmental health research has grown significantly over the past three decades as the consequences of rising global temperatures have become clear. 

Perry Hystad, a professor in the College of Health at Oregon State University, had expected to receive a five-year NIH grant to study who is most susceptible to extreme-weather exposure. He planned to follow more than 200,000 people in 27 countries, a far larger subject base than most studies. But he no longer believes he will receive the grant.

Federal funding is vital. “There’s nothing that comes close,” said Dr. Shohreh Farzan, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “This could be a really devastating loss to scientists who have worked for years with a goal of keeping people healthy.”

Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the health risks of climate change, said the field was already poorly funded. The NIH finally began to put an emphasis on funding climate change research during the Biden administration, she said, and eliminating more of it could have serious consequences for public health. “Americans are dying from climate change,” Dr. Ebi said.

Despite headwinds, broad alliance is making progress on climate change

Lately, the climate change news hasn’t been very upbeat. Much of the coverage has dealt with President Trump’s efforts to roll back government initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And there is growing pessimism about meeting the goals set by the 2015 Paris accord.

Then again, there is hard data that progress continues. “In spite of cultural backsliding and a diminishing sense of political urgency, the clean energy rollout continues,” David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent New York Times column. “In fact, it continues at a pace that would have astonished even optimistic forecasters a decade ago.”

He noted that last year worldwide spending on the energy transition was almost twice as high as it was in 2021. “In the United States, Vox recently tallied, wind capacity has grown more than 20-fold in two decades, and utility-scale battery capacity is up almost 30-fold in just five years…. Worldwide, solar capacity installation more than doubled since 2022. In 2024, more than 90 percent of all new power installed globally was clean.”

One reason is that a growing number of business leaders are realizing that the transition from fossil fuels is inevitable and that their companies’ success depends on adapting to this reality. Meantime, more and more consumers are concluding that electric cars (EVs) and solar panels are smart choices for them. And Americans are increasingly tuned in to the costs that climate change is imposing on their finances, their homes, and their health. Today 39 percent of Americans believe that global warming is harming our health “a great deal” or “a moderate amount,” up from 31 percent in 2014. 

Fortunately, many nonprofit groups have taken up the cause, generally below radar. For example, a few seasoned GOP political operatives have created the EV Politics Project, a bipartisan effort to better understand the growing divide between Republicans and Democrats (and Independents) over EV adoption. The group is researching the causes of this divide “and developing highly effective communications strategies to overcome it…”

Another organization, America Is All In, has built an expansive coalition of cities, states, tribal nations, businesses, schools, and faith, health, and cultural institutions. It is developing and delivering an ambitious national climate strategy. The group’s leaders issued a statement April 9 in response to an executive order from President Trump that threatens state and local climate laws protecting American communities and fighting climate change. They derided the executive order as “an attempt to threaten the constitutionally protected authority of state and local governments to protect their residents through strong environmental and climate policies.” 

Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina started and heads RepublicEn.org at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Inglis believes that “it’s time to invest in right-of-center outreach on climate!”

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby champions a “consistently respectful, nonpartisan approach to climate education.” CCL trains and supports volunteers to build relationships with elected officials, the media and their local community. The organization strongly supports pricing carbon, saying: “A strong, economy-wide price on carbon could reduce America’s carbon pollution by 50% by 2030, putting us on track to reach net zero by 2050.”

Other outfits promoting carbon pricing (besides us!) include the Climate Leadership Council, the Carbon Tax Center, and the Pricing Carbon Initiative, which provides a forum for ongoing discussions among a broad range of stakeholders on potential pricing mechanisms and strategies.

Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends was started by 30 college Republican leaders and champions the carbon dividend plan promoted by James A. Baker III and the late George P. Shultz, both leaders in President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

Hundreds–perhaps thousands–of other organizations, including leading environmental nonprofits, are also contributing to the effort to speed the transition to clean energy. All of us need to keep at it.