Washington, April 4 (BNA) The White House said in its first-ever assessment that floods, fires and droughts caused by climate change could harm the US federal budget every year by the end of the century.
The Office of Management and Budget Assessment, commissioned by President Joe Biden last May, found that the upper range of climate change’s impact on the budget by the end of the century could amount to 7.1% of annual revenue losses, the equivalent of $2 trillion annually in today’s dollars. , Reuters reports.
“Climate change threatens communities and sectors across the country, including through floods, droughts, extreme heat, wildfires, and hurricanes (affecting) the United States economy and the lives of ordinary Americans,” Candace Falsing, OMB Climate and Science Officer, said Chief Economist Danny Yagan. In a blog seen by Reuters prior to its publication on Monday.
“Future damage could dwarf current damage if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.”
The analysis found that the federal government could spend an additional $25 billion to $128 billion annually on expenditures such as coastal disaster relief, floods, crop insurance, health care, and suppressing wildfires and floods at federal facilities.
Just last year, a record heat and drought in the western United States triggered two wildfires that swept California and Oregon and were among the largest in both states’ history.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in March that the severe drought that has ravaged parts of the western United States since mid-2020 is likely to continue or worsen this spring.
US military bases, including Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, have suffered billions of dollars in damage in recent years from floods and hurricanes.
The Office of Management and Budget said an increase in wildfires could increase federal fire suppression costs by between $1.55 billion and $9.6 billion annually. Nearly 12,200 federal buildings and structures could be submerged as sea levels rise with replacement costs of nearly $44 billion.
In the absence of policies and measures to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are on course to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
The Office of Management and Budget’s grim assessment came hours before the publication of the long-awaited UN Panel on Climate Sciences report on methods for reducing emissions, a report that some scientists say could downplay some potentially devastating scenarios due to its consensual nature that 195 governments have been forced to agree to. . on him.
Biden, a Democrat who styled himself as a champion of tackling climate change when he took office in January 2021, has had to prop up rising domestic oil drilling and liquefied natural gas exports to Europe as Russia’s war on Ukraine drove up energy inflation.
The president’s “Building Back Better” bill, which contained hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to combat climate change and support clean energy, was frozen in the narrowly divided Senate by Republican and conservative West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, founder and part-owner For private charcoal brokerage.
Biden late last month presented a $5.8 trillion budget plan to Congress with a focus on deficit reduction in an apparent presentation to Manchin that he could not vote on the bill because it would increase the deficit. Biden’s budget plan requires nearly $45 billion to address climate change in fiscal year 2023, an increase of nearly 60% from fiscal year 2021.