t r u t h o u t | What the CBO Isn't Telling Congress: Climate Change Threatens Million of Jobs

This denial is rejected by most economists who have studied climate change. In a survey of 144 top climate economists released November 4, 2009, by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, 84 percent agreed that "the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies." A majority stated that sectors that will be negatively affected include agriculture, fishing, forestry, insurance and health services.

But the profound negative economic impact of climate change is being largely ignored or denied in the current public policy debate. This denial threatens to have a significant effect on public policy. For example, testimony October 14, 2009, by Douglas W. Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, states, "Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate." He claims that "a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7 degrees Fahrenheit (F) by 2100." He cites only two studies, one published in 2004; the other, which he describes as "the most comprehensive published study," was published in 2000, a decade before current research on the impacts of climate change.

This testimony completely ignores the British government's 700-page "Stern Review," widely regarded as the most definitive study so far of the economic impact of global warming, released on October 30, 2006, by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern. It states, "Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century."

...

Such denial leads to a deadly miscalculation of the economic cost of failure to counter global warming. The CBO acknowledges that "unchecked increases in greenhouse-gas emissions" would "probably reduce output over time, especially later in this century." However, the CBO concludes that the net effects on GDP of restricting emissions in the United States are likely to be negative over the next few decades. That conclusion results from a total failure to consider the devastating impact of climate change on the global and US economies, as revealed, for instance, in the "Stern Review."

How many epidemics and Katrinas will it take to expose the myth that the US economy is somehow exempt from the threats of climate change? And what terrible price will we pay if we shun the cost of climate protection, but not the far greater cost of climate change?