Saturday, May 28, 2022

Calculating the financial value of a habitable planet

The Biden administration calculates the monetary cost of greenhouse gas emissions when it considers regulations. Some Republican-led states tried to block this, but the Supreme Court ruled on May 26 that the Biden administration could continue to do so.

See: "Supreme Court Allows Greenhouse Gas Cost Estimates." Adam Liptak. New York Times. May 26, 2022.

This is different: "If the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority rules for the dirty coal companies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, it could gut the Clean Air Act and weaken the EPA's ability to stop power plants and other corporate polluters from emitting deadly, climate-wrecking pollution into our air."

Watch NRDC's 3-minute video — NRDC email, May 31, 2022

Related:

"How Much Will the Wildfires Cost?" Jill Cowan. New York Times. September 16, 2020.

"As Wildfires Burn Out of Control, the West Coast Faces the Unimaginable." Thomas Fuller and Jack Healy. New York Times. September 13, 2020.

Read: "California plans big insurance shifts as climate change hits home" [subscriber gift link]: The actions of the nation’s biggest insurance market could have implications for U.S. consumers, as more carriers leave disaster-prone states. Brianna Sacks. Washington Post. September 21, 2023.

First came the wildfire. Then came the scams. Grist.

"In this episode of When We Are, I talk about those insisting that you can’t possibly choose a safer place to weather the climate crisis, because every place is endangered.
I discuss why this claim is obviously wrong (some places are, in fact, relatively safe), and also who benefits from making it."
Why do some people want you to ignore climate threats? Those who stand to benefit when climate risk is denied want you to believe no place is any safer than the worst places. Don't buy it. Alex Steffen, The Snap Forward, Jan 27, 2026

And as a throwback

"The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital." Costanza et al. Nature. May 15, 1997.


Regarding this study: "Researchers estimate that, thanks to the carbon we have already emitted, global income will be reduced by 19 percent. This is primarily due to falling agricultural yields, labor productivity, and harm to existing infrastructure." Katharine Hayhoe, LinkedIn, July 9, 2024


To read more: "Yes, Climate Change is Expensive" (on Medium). It's a 9-minute read.

calculator and paper with numbers

Calculator by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

In Florida alone (Tampa Bay, Sarasota and Fort Myers):

$1 trillion worth of commercial properties are directly in Hurricane Milton’s path, Matt Egan, CNN, October 8, 2024

Trump admin ends extreme weather database that has tracked cost of disasters since 1980, Andrew Freedman, CNN, May 8, 2025

The real estate industry is pressuring Zillow and other sites to nix extreme weather risk data buyers have come to rely on Ella Nilsen, CNN, Dec 2, 2025

I forget, is $2 trillion bucks a year a lot of money? #CostOfClimate #ClimateChange #ClimateCost insideclimatenews.org/news/1501202...

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— Bentley (@bigclimate.bsky.social) January 20, 2026 at 10:09 AM

See here: "2025 was the third-warmest year on record (2024 being the warmest), with 23 separate weather disasters in the United States each costing a billion dollars or more. Vast neighborhoods of our nation’s second-largest city went up in flames, creating $53 billion in damages. Dozens of children drowned in a flash flood in Texas. And the rate of warning is actually accelerating, according to a new scientific paper published March 6." (The most important thing we're not talking about: A guest essay on how the biggest story of our time -- the climate crisis -- got pushed into the background, and how to refocus, Anya Kamenetz, The Ink, Mar 13, 2026)

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