Climate Change’s Giant Impact on the Economy: 4 Key Issues

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/upshot/how-to-think-about-the-costs-of-climate-change.html

Source:  By Neil Irwin, The New York Times.

Excerpt: Many of the big economic questions in coming decades will come down to just how extreme the weather will be, and how to value the future versus the present. ...A government report in November raised the prospect that a warmer planet could mean a big hit to G.D.P. in the coming decades. ...Consider three possible ways that climate change could exact an economic cost:

  • A once-fertile agricultural area experiences hotter weather and drought, causing its crop yields to decrease.
  • A road destroyed by flooding because of rising seas and more frequent hurricanes must be rebuilt.
  • An electrical utility spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a more efficient power grid because the old one could not withstand extreme weather.

The farmland’s yield decline is a permanent loss of the economy’s productive capacity...
The road rebuilding might be expensive, but at least that money is going to pay people and businesses to do their work. The cost for society over all is that the resources that go to rebuilding the road are not available for something else that might be more valuable. That’s a setback, but it’s not a permanent reduction in economic potential like the less fertile farmland....
By contrast, new investment in the power grid could yield long-term benefits in energy efficiency and greater reliability....

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