The High Cost Of Doing Nothing

While policymakers in Washington debate what to do about climate change, it is already costing the American people tens of billions of dollars every year, and the costs are rising. In 2012, that price tag was especially high: Climate-related droughts, super storms, hurricanes, blizzards, heat waves, and wildfires in the United States killed 349 people and caused an estimated $139 billion in damages. Across the nation, more than 3,500 monthly weather records for heat, rain, and snow were shattered -- a new, all-time high. While it is difficult to tie individual extreme weather events to climate change, the science is unequivocal: the growing accumulation of carbon pollution ringing our planet turbocharges what once were just natural disasters. Now, their intensity is increasingly man-made.

Last year, the costs of extreme weather in the United States totaled almost 1 percent of the nation's gross domestic product -- equal to roughly half of all the sales taxes states collected in 2012. That cost is, in effect, a "climate disruption tax," equal to a 2.7 percentage point increase in what Americans paid in sales taxes last year.

Certainly, if the president proposed a climate disruption tax to pay for these disasters, many in Congress would be up in arms. But the fact is, we're already paying the price in climate disruption now. What can we do? For one, substantially lowering carbon emissions would reduce climate change's negative impacts on the U.S. economy by helping to moderate an increasingly unstable climate, and by reducing the future climate-change-related costs that families, businesses, and governments will shoulder.

This fact sheet is adapted from a March 1, 2013, blog by NRDC's Climate and Clean Air Program Director Dan Lashof: Sequester This: U.S. Consumers Paid a 2.7% Climate Disruption Tax in 2012

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