Timmons Roberts
Highlights:
“The United States pays billions of dollars while China, Russia, and India have contributed and will contribute nothing.”
This statement is misguided and misleading. India and China are industrializing countries. China’s emissions have leveled off over the past three years, 13 years ahead of the deadline they agreed as part of their Paris pledge and with per capita emissions one-third that of the U.S. India’s are still rising, but from a per capita level of emissions one-tenth of the U.S. and with per capita incomes only 3 percent of the U.S. Both countries have invested massively in expanding renewable energy with generation capacity that now surpasses the U.S. by a large margin. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains by far the country most responsible for today’s carbon pollution....
Trump’s claim appears to draw from a Heritage Foundation report, which looks narrowly at the costs of climate action, without factoring in the enormous cost of doing nothing. This oversight is crucial: If we don’t act on climate change quickly, rising seas will cost hundreds of billions to hold back from damaging coastal cities. Fires, droughts, and more intense hurricanes will continue to drive up disaster relief costs. The 2006 Stern Review back pioneered the economics of trying to understand those costs, and they are huge. Sir Nicholas Stern and his co-authors found that not acting to prevent climate change was far more expensive than acting on climate change, and the point has been confirmed repeatedly since then.
