Who Pays for Climate Change (You do and your children after you)

U.S. Taxpayers Outspend Private Insurers Three-to-One to Cover Climate Disruption Costs

 Natural Resources Defense Council

Sandy Storm Surge

Despite the lengthy debate on the federal budget in Congress, climate change rarely gets mentioned as a deficit driver. Yet paying for climate disruption was one of the largest non-defense discretionary budget items in 2012. Indeed, when all federal spending on last year's droughts, storms, floods, and forest fires are added up, the U.S. Climate Disruption Budget was nearly $100 billion.

The startling reality:

• America's taxpayers paid three times what private insurers paid out to cover losses from extreme weather.
• The federal government spent more taxpayer money on the consequences of 2012 extreme weather than on education or transportation.

Texas Drought

Overall, the insurance industry estimates that 2012 was the second costliest year in U.S. history for climate-related disasters, with more than $139 billion in damages. But private insurers themselves only covered about 25 percent of these costs ($33 billion), leaving the federal government and its public insurance enterprises to pay for the majority of the remaining claims.

In fact, the U.S. government paid more than three times as much as private insurers paid for climate-related disasters in 2012.

Cutting Costs By Addressing Climate Change Now

Fortunately, there is much that the president can do to fight climate change without waiting for the current Congress to act. NRDC has developed a groundbreaking plan to use the Clean Air Act to make big reductions in carbon pollution from power plants, America's largest source of global warming pollution. Our analysis shows that the EPA can set fair and flexible standards that cut power plant carbon pollution by 26 percent by 2020 and 34 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels. (Read our roadmap for cutting carbon pollution.)

We don't have to just accept an ever-increasing Climate Disruption Budget that our children will have to pay for. We can fight back with a more forward-looking approach, starting now.
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The Citizens' Climate Lobby has another approach to reducing emissions and creating jobs.