Report Tallies High Toll on Economy From Global Warming

Despite the largely good news in the Supreme Court's EPA ruling, the nation continues to face serious issues with global warming and sea level rise.  A new bipartisan report looks at the likely high toll on the U.S. economy and the lives of many Americans if something is not done to deal with the situation.  Not only will coastal areas suffer, but America's agricultural system will be faced with changing climate which will cause some regions to have to change their current crops and/or practices.  The New York Times has an article that looks at the report's findings.  Here are excerpts:

More than a million homes and businesses along the nation’s coasts could flood repeatedly before ultimately being destroyed. Entire states in the Southeast and the Corn Belt may lose much of their agriculture as farming shifts northward in a warming world. Heat and humidity will probably grow so intense that spending time outside will become physically dangerous, throwing industries like construction and tourism into turmoil.

That is the picture of what may happen to the United States economy in a world of unchecked global warming, according to a major new report being put forward Tuesday by a coalition of senior political and economic figures from the left, right and center, including three Treasury secretaries stretching back to the Nixon administration.

At a time when the issue of climate change has divided the American political landscape, pitting Republicans against Democrats and even fellow party members against one another, the unusual bipartisan alliance of political veterans said that the country — and business leaders in particular — must wake up to the enormous scale of the economic risk.

“The big ice sheets are melting; something’s happening,” George P. Shultz, who was Treasury secretary under President Richard M. Nixon and secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, said in an interview. He noted that he had grown concerned enough about global warming to put solar panels on his own California roof and to buy an electric car. “I say we should take out an insurance policy.”

The former Treasury secretaries — including Henry M. Paulson Jr., a Republican who served under President George W. Bush, and Robert E. Rubin, a Democrat in the Clinton administration — promised to help sound the alarm. All endorse putting a price on greenhouse gases, most likely by taxing emissions.

In an interview in New York, Mr. Rubin urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to take a tougher stance in requiring that publicly held companies disclose the climate-related risks they may face. While many companies have started issuing such warnings to investors, the disclosures are often vague and inadequate, he said.

“Here we have this existential threat that I really do think has the possibility of being catastrophic, and I don’t think people have any sense of that,” Mr. Rubin said.

The campaign behind the new report, called Risky Business, is funded largely by three wealthy financiers who are strong advocates of action on global warming: Mr. Paulson, who with his wife, Wendy, has helped finance conservation efforts for decades; Thomas F. Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund executive and Democrat who is pushing to make global warming a central issue in political races around the country; and Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, who now urges cities to confront the threat of climate change.

The report said the economic effects would vary substantially by region. Some colder states may actually benefit from higher temperatures in significant ways, including longer growing seasons.

Under the likeliest projections, Mr. Houser said, the American economy will keep growing throughout this century despite the increasing economic drag from climate change. So people in the future will probably be wealthier than those of today.

But the warming will nonetheless impose huge costs, the report said. Coastal counties, home to 40 percent of the nation’s population, will take especially large hits from the rise of the sea, which could swallow more than $370 billion worth of property in Florida and Louisiana alone by the end of the century.

[L]ong before homes and businesses along the coast are entirely inundated, the researchers said, owners will face escalating damages from flooding. That poses substantial risks to taxpayers, who subsidize the National Flood Insurance Program, which has already been put more than $20 billion in the red by storms of recent years. Coastal property owners have fought attempts by Congress to charge premiums reflecting the true hazard.

With current agricultural practices, the losses could be substantial in the Southeast and the Corn Belt, as high temperatures and water stress take a toll on crops. That would have to be made up by an agricultural shift to the northern rim of the country, with states like North Dakota and Minnesota potentially being net winners.

But in parts of the country, farmers and other outdoor laborers will face routinely dangerous working conditions as summers grow longer and hotter, the report found.

Read the entire piece.  The question remains as to whether the ignorance embracing elements of the GOP will finally wake up and accept the reality that something needs to be done.  The first step, of course, is admitting that a problem even exists - a big challenge when dealing with the Virginia GOP.