Preventing Climate Change Isn’t Expensive. Doing Nothing Is.

There’s no other way to say this: worrying about how much it costs to prevent catastrophic climate change is patently  absurd.

It is absurd in a political system where money is simply conjured out of thin air and trillions of dollars are pumped into the black hole of waste that is the Pentagon. And it is absurd when the stakes are the survival of civilization itself, at which point the deficit isn’t exactly going to matter a whole lot.

But let’s play this game for a moment, since this selective deficit hand-wringing continues to be one of the main weapons of the fossil fuel lobby and its proxies in Congress and the media. Even if we accept this ridiculous discourse on its own terms, the destruction heaped on the East Coast this past month by hurricanes Helene and Milton alone — both of which were made extra destructive as a result of the rapidly warming climate — shows that it is far more expensive to do nothing about climate change than to invest in mitigating its effects and preventing it from getting worse.

Let’s take the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s chief accomplishment on fighting climate change, and the most recent target of this price-point fearmongering. First estimated to cost $370 billion, its unlimited tax credits have led some economists to revise this estimate upward to anywhere between around half a trillion dollars to, on the high end, more than $1 trillion. That’s a lot of money.

Now let’s look at the hurricane damage from just these two events in the past month. The most recent assessment of the damage left by Helene, carried out by experts at AccuWeather, puts the total estimate for damage and economic loss —  meaning disruptions to travel and business, and the hurricane’s impact on future tourism and other industries — at $225–250 billion.

A different estimate by analytics firm CoreLogic that looks only at the physical damage puts it at $30.5–$47.5 billion….