Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country

[Passages]

Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year, far more than economists predicted.

by Ryan Cooper June 20, 2025

Back in 2018, Yale economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his work on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The idea was to set up a picture of the global economy, add on some estimates of the economic costs of warming with a “damage function,” plus estimates of what climate policy would cost, and all adjusted with a discount term to account for how people value current production more than future production (according to economists, at least). That way you can calculate an “optimal” climate policy in the form of a carbon tax that would precisely compensate for warming damages without burdening the economy too much.

At the time, I wrote an extensive critique of the model, focused mainly on its damage function. For this, Nordhaus used a smooth quadratic equation, meaning it ruled out the possibility of any sharp upward breaks from tipping-point effects, like the Arctic Ocean becoming permanently ice-free or Siberian permafrost melting and releasing massive amounts of methane. Following Nordhaus’s advice to let warming drift up to 3.5 degrees Celsius, I argued, would be taking a hideous risk.

Fast-forward seven years, and it turns out that I was wrong: The economic damage of climate change is already much, much worse than DICE predicted, and the economic cost of policy to fix climate change is actually negative. I would like to apologize for the error.

On the first point, Bloomberg Intelligence has the details in a new report estimating that climate disasters cost America $955 billion in the 12-month period ending May 1 this year, or about 3 percent of GDP. This mainly comes from skyrocketing home insurance premiums, which have doubled since 2017, as well as expensive weather disasters, like the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ($113 billion) and the Los Angeles fires ($65 billion).
https://prospect.org/environment/2025-06-20-climate-change-will-bankrupt-country/


Jeff Berardelli
@WeatherProf
Tampa's summers are getting hotter. Using 90 as a threshold, we can see that the number of 90 degree days has doubled in the last ~50 years. @WFLA

Link to tweet

[hatrack]

1. Oh no! If only someone had tried to warn us, using the tools of science to . . . oh, wait . . .

Oops.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Home insurance will be a luxury item

You can't pay for insurance, you can't pay to fix it with or without insurance. Everything will be left to rot.

[hatrack]

3. One more Andrew, one more Michael, and that'll be it for private property insurance in Florida

Remaining carriers will at a bare minimum stop issuing new coverage. When it stops making sense for them to invest in the state, they will stop.

Unlike Republicans, they can read climate reports and storm trends and understand what they mean.

DeSantis and Co may stumble along for another year or two with last-resort state policies, but the end of the Florida real estate game will be in sight.

[Passages]

5. That is the fear, in a nutshell.

[littlemissmartypants]

4. I see ...

dead homeless people.

[Turbineguy]

6. Trump won't like that.

Maybe he can still bankrupt it first.

[modrepub]

7. This Is A Prime Example

Of scientists being conservative in their predictions.

Another thing to ponder, most species extinctions in the fossil record can be traced to changes in climate. Our activities are raising CO2 and other greenhouse gases faster than anything we’ve observed in the last million years. You’re a fool if you think humans can’t impact global climate.

[ananda]

8. I don't think Trump or Republicans plan to spend any money whatsoever...

on disasters or helping reduce carbon emissions.

[Kid Berwyn]

9. You know who should go bankrupt?

Them who broke it.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/international-survey-shows-81-back-forcing-big-oil-to-pay-for-climate-destruction

[Passages]

10. 100%!!!

Reparations.

Would love to see criminal prosecutions for their intentional deceptions/fraud going back to the 70"s too.

[Brainfodder]

11. Time for govt. to buy up stuff, these cost numbers they toss out, they need HEAVY AF SCRUTINY.

IMHO, We are collectively MORONS for having utilities in private hands.

[Ibapah]

12. They have known for a long time

The rich and powerful have known about and believe the consequences for a long time. This is why there are threats to take over Canada and Greenland. This is why the wealthy have compounds in New Zealand and Argentina.

[bronxiteforever]

13. All this in my lifetime. Now I weep as I imagine

the future awaiting the children of our planet.

[et tu]

14. catastrophic climate change is here

if only the jewish space lasers could knock out
the fossil fuels- of course
governments must step up and it is way past time.

[madville]

15. Country is already bankrupt

Really, what’s a few more trillion? It’ll get passed on to everyone as inflation like usual.

This country has been financially and morally bankrupt for the last decade or three, don’t see it getting fixed, just have to adapt to the slow boil.

[Botany]

16. Exxon knew all about this in 1977. In something like 1850 in Germany experiments showed the CO 2 in a

body of gas the more heat that body of gas will hold. That is part of the universal gas laws and
has never been disproven once. And the fossil fuel industries have spent billions in misinformation
about climate change and buying the Republican Party to deny reality.

**************

Scientific American.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

[hatrack]

18. Knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of CO2 predates the Civil War . . . .

John Tyndall confirmed the greenhouse effect in 1859; Eunice Foote established that CO2 and water vapor absorb energy from infrared radiation in 1856.

[Botany]

19. About 2 miles from where I am sitting right now in Columbus, Ohio is Ohio State University's Institute of

Polar Studies that literally has millions of data points from ice cores that in some cases go
back 450,000 years and those ice cores show undeniable links between atmospheric CO 2
and global temperatures. The science and data are solid and real but still I meet and hear
from local residents who get upset and spout gibberish that climate change is a hoax and
besides the changes that we’ve are seeing just cyclical. Billions have been spent on brain-
washing these mouth breathers.

Btw I am an expert about parts of the environment and the stupidity gets old.

[hatrack]

21. Yep. Lonnie Thompson is Da Man!

"Thin Ice" is a fantastic book.

[msfiddlestix]

17. On this front, Change is stiff competition with the Crime Syndicate operating out of the Oval Office

or hasn't climate change monitors and advocates noticed?

[dedl67]

20. It has been estimated the every dollar invested in the Weather Bureau ...

... saves 78 dollars for our society as a whole.

The dismantling of climate science is one of the great crimes of our time, a crime against the country and the planet. It is just one part of this administration's hatred of science in general.