In the NewsProPublicaOctober 28, 2021

There’s No Cheap Way to Deal With the Climate Crisis

For every ton of carbon dioxide emitted starting today, temperatures will rise higher and faster. Solomon Hsiang, an economist and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the research group Climate Impact Lab, estimates that each degree Celsius of warming will erase 1.2% of GDP per year, and those tolls will mount. Failure to curb climate emissions at all could put the United States on a path to losing 5% to 10.5% of its GDP annually. Based on last year’s GDP, this extreme — and unlikely — scenario could amount to nearly $2.2 trillion each year.