Not Tackling The Climate Crisis Is Going To Be Expensive AF
Fights over solutions to the climate crisis often boil down to one question: How much will a specific policy cost? But what’s left out of these conversations is the even higher financial toll of doing nothing.
Yes, you read that right. Not acting on climate change, climate experts warn, has a higher price tag. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the decade. Maybe much worse.
“We only talk about the costs of doing something about the problem,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s been really remarkable how infrequently we talk about the costs of not solving the problem, which are almost incalculably large.”
Democrats have begun leaning into the “climate inaction costs more” idea, desperate to convey the message to voters. “And every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases,” said President Joe Biden this week. “The most unaffordable path forward is inaction,” said Robert Reich, former secretary of labor. “Climate action is much more affordable than climate inaction,” wrote Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Meanwhile, eye-popping price tags of bold climate solutions abound. Biden proposed $555 billion for climate policies in his Build Back Better bill. And the US is one of several countries this week that collectively pledged roughly $19 billion in public and private funds to help end deforestation by 2030. That’s all on top of the $100 billion a year by 2020 that developed nations promised developing nations back in 2009 and have not yet delivered.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/climate-change-inaction-cost
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