“Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010," writes Christopher Flavelle in the New York Times.
“The new figures, reported Thursday morning by Munich Re, a company that provides insurance to other insurance companies, are the latest signal of the growing cost of climate change.”
The actual cost is closer to $240 billion.
From The Great Healing: “Based on field tests and data from historic heat waves, the crop yields of major grains can be expected to drop 10% for each degree of global temperature rise. The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States published by the Universal Ecological Fund FEU-US in 2018, conservatively estimated, 'The impacts of weather events influenced by human-induced climate change and direct health consequences of pollution from fossil fuel use are currently causing, on average, $240 billion a year in economic losses, damages and health costs — or about 40% of the current growth of the United States economy.' The report projects economic losses to escalate to $360 billion per year. This will cripple American economic growth."
The report's coauthor Sir Robert Watson concludes, “Burning fossil fuels comes at a giant price tag, which the U.S. economy cannot afford and not sustain.”[i]
Read the article here.
[i] Sir Robert Watson, Dr. James J. McCarthy, Liliana Hisas, The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States, Universal Ecological Fund, Sep. 2017, https://feu-us.org/case-for-climate-action-us/
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