Steve Amstrup: Costs of doing something pale compared to inaction
By Steve Amstrup
For decades, big oil and its ultra-rich collaborators have run multimillion -dollar campaigns to block mitigation of anthropogenic climate change.
The campaign to repeal the Climate Commitment Act continues that pattern of resistance. Proponents of I-2117 claim CCA is too expensive. There will be up-front costs in moving our economy to renewable energy. What proponents of I-2117 don’t tell us, however, is those up-front costs would have been much lower had we not been deceived into inaction for years, that costs will only increase the longer we postpone action, or most importantly that the costs of moving to the right energy path pale compared to not doing so.
The laws of physics require the world to warm as long as CO2 concentrations rise. For decades climate models have projected that a warmer atmosphere will mean more frequent and severe droughts and storms, and more radical weather fluctuations. Accordingly, the Western wildfire season has increased from 140 days in the 1970s and 1980s to essentially year-round. Five-hundred-year storm events now occur annually, while crops fail and livestock starve due to hotter summers and increasingly radical weather fluctuations.
Similarly, costs of recovering from climate-related disasters have steadily increased. In the 1980s, the U.S. annually experienced fewer than eight climate-related disasters from which recovery cost $1 billion or more (CPI adjusted). Last year we had 28 such disasters with a total cost of $600 billion. The result of years in denial is now painfully obvious. Deniers can no longer claim, “Oh, predictions of disaster are only models.”
When Let’s Go Washington brings up high gasoline costs (without serious analysis), they avoid mentioning disastrous costs of doing nothing. Unabated CO2 emissions guarantee climate related disasters will become more common and more expensive. On our current CO2 growth trajectory, late century summer temperatures in Spokane will be essentially identical to current temperatures in Kansas City. If we let that happen, impacts on our agriculture, timber, recreation, and overall inland NW lifestyles will constitute disaster any way we slice it.
Given the dire future that will result from continued business as usual, dogged resistance to climate action is hard to explain? Why do we face I-2117? Similarly why do we face I-2066, which would prohibit taking steps toward phasing out natural gas as we work toward making homes and offices more energy efficient. Yes, moving to an economy based on renewable energy will include some transitional costs and changes we initially don’t like. But prolonging our current CO2 path will make everything more expensive and unlikable. Continuing business as usual contrasts with the long-held ideal of leaving a world for our children that is better than the one we inherited.
The explanation for resistance may lie in the fact that those invested in maintaining fossil fuel use may see smaller short-term financial gain in transition to renewable energy. Continuing to maximize profit now, they must believe, will allow them to outrun the damage they create, or hide from it on an island somewhere. On the other hand, those of us with little political pull, especially those living closest to the land and with modest means have no escape.
Washington’s CCA is not perfect. And Washington’s actions alone will not halt climate change, which is a global problem requiring action on all fronts. In that vein, CCA is an important step beyond decades of deceit and denial that provides a model upon which other states and jurisdictions can build. CCA would have been a better law if our republican legislators had contributed ideas and effort rather than resistance and denial. Fully implementing CCA, however, would give all of our policy makers a second chance to improve it.
Instead of passing I-2117, killing CCA, and continuing down an emissions path that at most can benefit only the elite few; we should forsake partisanship, vote no on I-2117, and work together to improve CCA and other legislative efforts to halt continued warming and its dangerous symptoms? Doing so could save a climate our children might choose rather than one they are forced to endure.
Steve Amstrup has studied polar bears for over 40 years and showed declining polar bear survival is linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Amstrup and his wife, Virginia, live in Kettle Falls.