Climate Change Is Affordable

A new assessment allows us to think about good policy without panicking

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"You have to do some research to figure out what’s going on, but the key is their estimate of future emissions. The report adopts the RCP 8.5 scenario—for “representative concentration pathway.” (Don’t ask.)

As a widely cited 2011 paper puts it, RCP 8.5 is a “high emission” scenario, in which global population grows faster than currently expected, technological change is minimal, improvement in energy efficiency is minimal. The scenario also requires the “extraction of large amounts of unconventional hydrocarbon resources well beyond presently extractable reserves.”

Yet the authors of the new U.S. assessment still arrive at a manageable $510 billion in estimated annual climate-related costs by 2090. This sum is overwhelmingly due to lost labor hours and higher mortality from extreme temperatures, which may not be estimated with much reliability.
(Interestingly, wildfire costs actually decline from present levels, “owing to projected landscape-scale shifts to vegetation with longer fire return interval.”)

Paying this bill would be a nuisance, not armageddon. Even if the U.S. economy grew at a meager 1.6% over the next 72 years, we’d still be three times as rich by 2090, with a GDP of $61 trillion."

"The new U.S. study finds that it would be especially expensive to adapt to an especially dire climate scenario. No kidding, Sherlock. But climate varies and humans do adapt. Populations and economic activities (like farming) relocate over time. Coastal communities pull back or build dikes.

This is costly, but not so costly that average human welfare won’t keep going up, up, up even under the RCP 8.5 scenario."