Category: ECO_COSTS_MN Heat_MN PATA_Heat_And_Ramifications_2022_Related

Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the costs of failing to act on climate change.

The widespread reliance on air conditioning in the US is explored in Eric Dean Wilson’s book After Cooling: on Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. The book explores how air conditioning has become one of the most effective ways to cool off – and explains how harmful chemicals that make our lives comfortable also contribute to the climate crisis.

Hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts – oh my! Not only was 2020 defined by COVID-19-induced volatility, over 22 weather and climate disasters, each with damages reaching over a billion dollars, hit the U.S. coast to coast last year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that 2020 shattered a previous annual record of 16 individual billion dollar weather events which occurred in both 2011 and 2017. With over 262 lives lost and more than $96.4 billion in total economic damages, these disasters will haunt impacted communities for years to come.

Some of the world’s largest oil companies have been ordered to pay part of a $7.2 billion tab to retire hundreds of aging wells in the Gulf of Mexico that they used to own, capping a case that legal experts say is a harbinger of future battles over cleanup costs.

An angry backlash is building across the middle of the U.S. as states step in to help their constituents pay billions of dollars in natural-gas bills racked up during February’s freeze. While most escaped the blackouts that occurred in Texas, states from Minnesota to Kansas are having to help local utilities, businesses and homeowners cover February bills after natural-gas prices surged from around $2 per million British thermal units to as much as $1,200 in parts of the country.

It’s widely known that Hurricane Harvey, one of the costliest storms in U.S. history, was supercharged by climate change. At least three separate studies have tried to quantify to what degree. In 2017, one research group led by Berkeley National Laboratory climate scientist Michael Wehner estimated that rainfall totals were 38 percent higher than expected because of human-induced climate change.

A report from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows that air pollution and climate change cost each American an average of $2,500 per year in health care. The researchers used data from dozens of published scientific papers.