Thread by @dwallacewells

Yesterday, I had the humbling privilege of testifying before the Senate Budget Committee on the cost of climate inaction. Recent net-zero commitments show the world finally understands the gains to be seized through decarbonization, I said. "Do we?" (1/x) budget.senate.gov/hearings/the-c…

Because a five-minute opening statement can only contain so much, I wanted to thread together some of the major points of my written testimony, which can be found here: budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

First, the impacts of climate change are already here and already enormous. This fact should be clear to anyone watching a television, and yet some of the present estimates are astonishing even to those of us paying close attention.

In 2020, the coronavirus killed, according to
the CDC, 350,000 Americans. According to one recent paper, air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels also killed, in the last year for which data are available, 350,000 Americans. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

In other words, a covid-level mortality event in the midst of what appeared to most of us, overlooking the cost of burning fossil fuels, an unexceptional year. Decarbonize, and you could save all of those American lives.

The numbers are so large they can seem almost hard to credit, and they may yet be revised—though it is a distressing fact of climate science that almost all revisions push estimates of damage, and therefore the cost of inaction, upward.

This is a familiar paradox of climate science, which offers harrowing assessments and projections which we know — must know — also offer the clearest picture we have of the future that awaits us should we fail to act.

Globally, the same paper suggested, 8.7 million deaths in 2018 can be attributed to pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels.

Now, that attribution is complex, and the deaths multi factorial, meaning they are hard to untangle from other contributing factors we often call comorbidities and know reflect enduring disparities.

Those include poverty, poor health care and housing
quality, underlying medical conditions. On all of these fronts, climate change and environmental degradation promise to worsen disparities, punishing those most intensely who are least able to endure and adapt.

In the U.S., we have been relatively protected from many of these impacts—maybe especially from the impacts of air pollution.

According to an eye-opening estimate from the NRDC, the Clean Air Act of 1970 is still, today, saving 370,000 American lives every single year, delivering annual economic benefits of more than $3 trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it. nrdc.org/resources/clea…

Perhaps that estimate is too optimistic. But in theory it would cover the cost of last year's CARES Act, this year's Biden Jobs plan, and similarly-sized investments in the flourishing of future Americans every year hereafter.

But, unfortunately, many of these gains could be undone by air pollution produced by growing American wildfires over the next few decades.

In 2020, wildfire smoke produced more than half of all air pollution in the western U.S., meaning more particulate matter from the burning of forest infiltrated the lungs of Americans living there than from all other industrial and human activity combined. usnews.com/news/news/arti…

As skeptics sometimes point out, California once saw much bigger fires in its distant pre-Columbian past.

But it is also true that there weren’t 40 million people living there, then, either, breathing all that toxic air, and pushed by the state’s housing crisis to live further and further into what’s called the “wildland urban interface,” where fire risk is highest.

Since 1990, sixty percent of all new residential development in the state has come in wildfire-prone areas. Nationally, we are adding a million new homes to the “WUI” every three years.

When the Camp Fire incinerated Paradise, California, evacuees settled in nearby Chico—straining an already-strained housing supply, driving up homelessness, and sparking a backlash to those new arrivals
locals began calling “refugees,” and “unwanted”... theintercept.com/2019/11/07/cal…

...though they came from less than fifteen miles
away, chased by flames.

Now, California is still standing, mostly, after its horrific recent fires, as is Australia, after 46 million acres burned there last year, and Houston, after five of what were once called 500-year storms in just five years.

Nicaragua, where a category 5 hurricane followed just weeks after a category four, is having a harder time, as is Puerto Rico, almost five years after Hurricane Maria.

"But we are still here today," I said in the Senate yesterday, "after a record 22 billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. last year, debating what measures to take to stall the growth and blunt the force of climate change."

This is not just an indictment of past inaction, I said, though it was that. It was also all a sign that the impacts of warming aren’t the whole of our destiny, but instead form the natural landscape on which our future will be built and indeed contested.

Humans are adaptable, and resilient, and innovative though we can also be cruel, ruthlessly nationalistic
and punishingly prejudiced. It is easy to fear that second set of impulses growing more intense over time...

...as intuitions about resource scarcity and the threat of extreme weather drive mass migration and give credence to a zero-sum view of the world.

Already, as we live only with the known knowns of present warming, the climate obstacles to equitable human flourishing — and to promises of justice and prosperity and global cooperation we would hope to extend to future generations — are of an unprecedented scale.

The last time there was as much carbon
in the atmosphere today, NOAA recently reported, the planet wasn’t 1.2 degrees warmer, but 3. The arctic was full of forest. The seas weren’t rising by centimeters, but almost 80 feet higher. research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID…

The crudest prediction would be that what happened then will, more or less, happen
now—though some impacts, like sea level rise, would take centuries. But the science is
considerably more cautious, offering a picture of unchecked warming shrouded by several layers of uncertainty.

There is some uncertainty in the science itself—whether 2 degrees of warming will destroy all the planet’s coral reefs, depriving a billion people of a major food source, for instance, or just the vast majority of those reefs.

There is also some uncertainty about the sensitivity of the climate—whether, given a doubling of pre-industrial carbon concentrations, say, the planet warms by 2 degrees or 5.

And there is twofold uncertainty about the human response, as well: how quickly will we draw down our use of carbon, and how capably, how equitably, how justly and how ambitiously we adapt to the
devastating impacts of climate...

...which will hit the poor and the marginalized much more intensely, exacerbating and intensifying existing disparities and injustices, both within countries and globally.

But uncertainty is not — should not be, cannot be — an argument for inaction, as our slow-footed pandemic response shows all too well. And we do know in which direction the climate is headed. We also know the terrifying speed.

You may think that global warming is a long process, initiated at the beginning of the industrial revolution, with impacts accruing slowly over centuries—this was how I long understood it, as the work of ignorant grandparents whose impacts would be felt by innocent grandchildren.

But half of all the emissions produced from the burning of fossil fuels in all of human history have come in just the last 25 years. That's since Al Gore published his first book on warming. It is since the premiere of Friends.

That means, I told the Senate, that "climate responsibility—for the present crisis, and for preventing its worsening in the future—is alive on the planet today. It is in this room."

"I am not an old man—38 years old," I said. "Almost two thirds of all carbon emissions ever produced in the history of humanity have been produced in my
lifetime."

"A quarter of all that damage has been done since Joe Biden was elected Vice President in 2008. About a third has come since Senator Graham first joined the Senate."

At this, I noticed Lindsey Graham nodding at the front of the room.

To pull us up short of what has often been characterized as a catastrophic level of warming — 2 degrees — requires decarbonization at least as fast, and perhaps faster.

If we don’t? The landscape of possibility projected by science is, while uncertain, inarguably
alarming: 100-year floods every year, wildfires growing perhaps sixfold, extreme heat punishing South Asia and the Middle East.

Estimates of the aggregate economic impact of unmitigated climate change are still crude, and vary widely, with some older models suggesting an impact of just a few percentage points, and others offering much higher estimates.

Compared with a world without warming, between 2.5 and 3 degrees the world would lose between 15-25% of per capita global output would be lost, according to one much-cited paper. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Which means, of course, that much could be saved by avoiding it. All of these costs, fall disproportionately on the poor and marginalized, sharpening the edge of inequality and punishing those with the least—the least responsibility for warming and the least capacity to adapt.

As I noted in my written testimony, "in the United States, another estimate runs as follows..."

"'With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states.'"

"That estimate isn’t drawn from the r/collapse subreddit, or the talking points of Extinction Rebellion, or even the policy briefs of Sunrise. It is from the National Climate Assessment, intended to guide the climate policy of this body, and this country."

Just a few years ago, it seemed prudent to plan for scenarios at higher temperatures than three
degrees—four degrees, five degrees.

Thanks to a global political awakening, growing cultural pressure, and rapid, once-unthinkable improvements in the cost of renewables, those scenarios now appear, most scientists believe, considerably less likely.

This is good news, of course, though recent pledges are just paper pledges, at this point, and much more must be done, and much faster, to bring the world below two degrees.

And even that new, measured optimism is shrouded in uncertainty, as well: we could decarbonize rapidly and still end up unfortunately north of two degrees, if the climate proves more sensitive than we expect.

If we don’t accelerate our ambition, we could get “unlucky,” and end up at four degrees, perhaps even more. In that world, global mortality rates from climate change could be five times those of COVID-19—even when “adaptation” is factored in. impactlab.org/news-insights/…

That adaptive response is just as clouded by uncertainty as the sensitivity of the climate
system: though we flatter our own predictive powers in building precise models, in truth we have very limited ways of modeling technological progress, public investment and policy...

...especially deep into the future.

Adapting to two degrees may ultimately prove a
taller, more disruptive, and more expensive task than limiting warming to that level. And even today, we are paying much more to respond to disasters than to prevent them.

And the farther north we get, beyond two degrees, the more the needs and the costs will grow, too, along with the level of human suffering...

More sea walls; more migration, both managed and unmanaged; more air filters and cooling centers, more hospitals and firefighters and flood insurance and farm insurance, all efforts to protect humanity and project prosperity equitably into an uncertain future.

And as any investor or economist would tell you, of course, uncertainty itself is a cost—not an excuse for inaction but the opposite.

As they would also tell you, foregone benefits are a cost, too—and this is, I think, the biggest news on climate, and the one I tried to emphasize most yesterday: that the benefits of decarbonization, once considered trivial, are in fact enormous.

For a generation, climate action was too often seen as a purely moral or humanitarian burden. It will be that: a challenge to the world’s nations to be good stewards of the planet, of their citizens, and indeed of the citizens of other nations, who may suffer yet more.

But it no longer makes sense to talk about decarbonization as an expensive undertaking to be weighed against that moral burden, I think. In fact, quite the opposite: the cost of climate action, at least the right kind of climate action, is now almost certainly negative.

That is why, last year, Duke’s Drew Shindell testified before the House that a total decarbonization of the American electricity sector would be entirely paid for by the public health benefits of cleaner air... oversight.house.gov/news/press-rel…

... why estimates of the jobs created by that work grow into the millions, even as improbably high as 25 million (compared with under 200,000 jobs in oil, coal, and gas)... rewiringamerica.org

...and why, during the pandemic and independent of any international pressure, ambitious net-zero commitments were made by South Korea, Japan, the E.U. and, most significantly, China...

... each stitching climate considerations and the benefits of action into every aspect of their planning and policy, as we should, too. americanprogress.org/issues/green/r…

Personally, I don’t believe most existing models adequately reflect the real costs of inaction, biased towards easily quantifiable outcomes and historical precedent and away from extreme events and the unprecedented risks of an unprecedented climate.

And yet, even using those models, rapid decarbonization still comes out very much on top and in the black.

That bargain may not last so long. Climate change is not binary; each tenth of a degree matters. But the opportunity to pull up short of catastrophic warming, and help deliver the world to a relatively comfortable landing, is closing quickly.

This is both a generational responsibility, and an immediate one.

If the world had begun decarbonization in the year 2000, carbon emissions would only have had to fall by a couple of percentage points a year to safely avoid two degrees of warming. In 2010, the number was about 3 percent. Now, the number is almost ten percent.

Wait a decade and it will grow to 25% or
more.

How little would we have to feel we owed future generations to not act now? How blind
would we have to be to our own best interest, to calculate only the costs of decarbonization and
not its benefits?

How short-sighted and how narrow-minded would we have to be, to overlook returns arriving as soon as later this decade, to accept the intensification by climate of already painful inequalities...

...or to define the suffering of those living elsewhere in the world as so insignificant we remained unmoved by it, even though moving would be in our best interest, too? I hope we aren’t forced to learn the answers to those questions. (x/x)