The next time you hear a politician say that our country simply can’t afford to tackle climate change, send him a copy of the new report documenting the more than $300 billion in damage caused by natural disasters last year. That figure made 2017 the most expensive year on record for disasters in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Another NOAA finding: There were 16 billion-dollar events, which has happened only once before, in 2011. (There’s a great map in the NOAA report linked above.) The list includes Hurricanes Harvey ($125 billion), Irma ($50 billion) and Maria ($90 billion); floods and wildfires in California; hail storms in Colorado and Minnesota; and three tornado outbreaks. There was drought and fire in the Plains states. The 16 events killed 362 people, according to NOAA’s report.

The previous most expensive disaster year was 2005, when events such as Hurricane Katrina caused $215 billion in U.S. damage, when adjusted for inflation. NOAA’s record of billion-dollar natural disasters goes back to 1980.

The Partnership for Responsible Growth believes that Northern Hemisphere carbon pricing coordination makes all the sense in the world. That’s why we approached the Aspen Institute in 2016 to encourage that widely respected organization to convene a meeting of representatives from Canada, Mexico, and the United States to explore opportunities. We lined up influential partners: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, and Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

We co-hosted a two-day roundtable, featuring 40 policy experts, business people and political leaders from the three countries to address ways to integrate carbon pricing across the continent. In October 2016 the Canadian Embassy hosted a follow-up session that, like the first, was well attended and thought-provoking. But after the election of President Trump, the effort stalled. Our government’s lack of interest in this initiative blocked progress.

So we were heartened by an announcement December 12 at the One Planet climate summit organized by French President Emmanuel Macron. The heads of states and governments of Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile and Mexico; the governors of California, Washington; and the premiers of Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec declared their “commitment to implement carbon pricing as a central economic and environmental policy instrument for ambitious climate change action.”

“I found that the word ‘climate’ has been defined as a political issue. It was always a science issue for me,” retired climate scientist David Goodrich told The Christian Science Monitor’s Amanda Paulson. “You can talk about the latest drought that’s going on, or the big heavy rains we’ve been having, and on the coast you can talk about, ‘Boy, there’s been a lot of flooding.’ But if you say, ‘Isn’t that climate change?’ or ‘Isn’t that sea level rise?,’ there’s this wall that goes up.”

Goodrich was discussing his 4,208-mile cross-country bike trip, one of the half-dozen epic bike rides he has undertaken since 2000. His experiences are the raw material for his recently published book A Hole in the Wind (Pegasus, 249 pages).

A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist who served as  director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Goodrich returned to the United States in 2011 to find a nation and a people in denial, according to a Goodreads review. Concerned that Americans are willfully deluded by misinformation about climate that dominates media and politics, Goodrich thought a little straight talk could set things right. As they say in "Animal House," he decided that "this calls for a stupid and futile gesture on someone's part, and I'm just the guy to do it."

It’s been quite a year. Consider this lineup: Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, Lee, Maria, Nate, and Ophelia. Thanks to those hurricanes, 2017 has become the first year in more than a century in which 10 Atlantic storms in a row reached hurricane strength.

The record for the most weather-related disasters doing more than $1 billion in damage is 15, set last year. So far, 2017 has had 12, most recently the California wildfires. As of late October, the toll for those fires, some of which were still burning, was: 42 people dead, 8,400 homes destroyed, and 271,000 acres burned.

Hurricane Katrina still reigns as the U.S. weather-related disaster with the highest price tag: $160 billion. Hurricane Harvey ranks second ($86 to $108 billion), followed by Hurricane Irma ($64 to $92 billion), according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Despite all those eye-opening figures, many politicians continue to insist that taking steps to counter climate change would threaten our economic health. A more plausible view is that failure to take action will devastate our economy and impoverish our children.