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If Public Health Crisis Raised by Climate Crisis Doesn’t Get Your Attention, How About Economic Cost [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-27  

By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, editor@news-photos-features.com

It’s the Dog Days of August – and its only June. Texas and Florida are battling floods. But Governor Ron DeSantis is handling it: he’s made “climate change” illegal, effectively banning it from the state.

While voters are being conditioned by Republicans to obsess about inflation (eggs $1 more a week, gas 60c more a gallon!) and immigration (when immigration fuels economic growth), they are being conditioned to ignore the climate disaster that will impact the health, prosperity and well-being of all of us now and for generations to come.

We are now in the midst of the first heat wave of the year, when month after month, year after year, we have hit new records for heat, for wildfires and floods.

The climate crisis has become a public health crisis with 2,000 people a year dying from heat; thousands more because climate change is a “threat multiplier” causing acute and chronic cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses due to pollution, insect-borne disease, climate disasters like flooding which causes drowning and gastrointestinal illness; water and food-related infection, actually cutting a half-year off lifespan. (https://earth.org/establishing-the-link-climate-change-and-decreasing-life-expectancy/)

“Climate change-induced extreme heat threatens health and increases health care costs,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) reports. “Extreme heat affects everything from birth outcomes to mental well-being and leads to increased deaths from conditions such as heart and respiratory disease. According to the National Weather Service, extreme heat kills more Americans than any other kind of weather-related death in the United States.”

A 2023 CAP report estimated that each summer, “heat event days would be responsible for almost 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions for heat-related or heat-adjacent illness, adding approximately $1 billion in health care costs... Every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) is estimated to increase heart disease death rates by 2.8 percent. As the climate continues to warm, deaths from stroke and heart attacks due to extreme heat could triple by 2050.” (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/extreme-heat-is-more-dangerous-for-workers-every-year/)

But because Republicans seem to only react to their livelihoods but not lives, consider these economic metrics: (https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/climatechange/health_impacts)

Every three weeks, the United States experiences an extreme weather event that produces $1 billion worth of damage, averaging $150 billion a year ($165 billion in 2022) according to the latest US National Climate Assessment, CNN reported (https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/us/national-climate-assessment-extreme-weather-costs/)

Upset about the cost of a dozen eggs, a gallon of gas? Climate change will hit every pocketbook. Consumer Reports published a study from global consulting firm ICF estimating the lifetime personal cost of climate change for a baby born in the US in 2024 at $500,000 from costly repairs to damaged property, astronomical increases in home insurance, higher food costs, lost labor productivity. (https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/climate-change/the-per-person-financial-cost-of-climate-change-a6081217358/)

Now consider that researchers estimated complying with the Paris Climate Agreement would cost the global economy $6 trillion by 2050, compared to an estimated $38 trillion economic damage due to climate change, CNN reported. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/business/climate-change-disasters-economic-cost/index.html)

In the U.S., that is $150 billion a year spent to recover from climate disasters versus the $52.2 billion in discretionary budget spending in 2024 Biden is allocating to tackle the climate crisis (the largest budget request for climate change in history). Pretty savvy investment.

Biden has managed to conjoin climate action with environmental and economic justice, steering investment dollars where they can have the biggest bang for the buck. Here’s a sampling of actual programs:

The dollars for climate action make sense.

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© 2024 News & Photo Features Syndicate, a division of Workstyles, Inc. All rights reserved. For editorial feature and photo information, go to www.news-photos-features.com, email editor@news-photos-features.com. Blogging at www.dailykos.com/blogs/NewsPhotosFeatures. ‘Like’ us at facebook.com/NewsPhotoFeatures, Tweet @KarenBRubin

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