WASHINGTON — Fires, floods and hurricanes are already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year and climate change will drive those costs ever higher in coming years, a new federal study warns.
The report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, urges the Trump administration to take climate change risks seriously and begin formulating a response.
The study, scheduled to be released Tuesday, says that different sectors of the economy and different parts of the country will be harmed in ways that are difficult to predict. But one estimate projects that rising temperatures could cause losses in labor productivity of as much as $150 billion by 2099, while changes in some crop yields could cost as much as $53 billion. The Southwest will suffer more costly wildfires, the Southeast will see more heat-related deaths and the Northwest must prepare for diminished shellfish harvests.
The report acknowledges that it is difficult to pinpoint the costs of disasters that can be directly attributed to climate change. And the projected fiscal burden remains less than 1 percent of the current $3.8 trillion federal budget.
But Senators Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who jointly requested the report, said between the lines of a conservative government audit was an urgent economic message that Washington should heed.
