From grist: The fossil fuel industry has argued for decades that climate action kills economic growth—even as it’s become evident that inaction is the real economic killer.
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest lobbying group, took a similar tack andto put numbers behind the idea that climate policies would hurt the economy. In 1991, David Montgomery, an economist at the consulting firm Charles River Associates, calculated that a carbon tax—a fee imposed on fossil fuels—of $200 a ton would shrink the country’s economy by 1.7 percent by 2020, a finding that appeared in the Associated Press, CNN’s Moneyline, and the New York Times.
The 30-year-old strategy is still going strong. When former President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, he repeatedly cited industry-funded estimates of its cost, dropping : “2.7 million lost jobs by 2025,” “$3 trillion in lost GDP,” “households would have $7,000 less income.” These statistics, Stanford’s Franta said, were from some of the same industry-funded economists who had been quoted in newspapers in the 1990s.In February, the leaders of several organizations working to undermine climate action—the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and JunkScience.
in November, researchers from Europe and Canada argued that these “overly pessimistic” calculations provide “a skewed image to policy-makers,” drawing their attention to the cost of taking action.Such economic models render key aspects of this planetary problem invisible, from soaring temperatures and oppressive heat waves to the slow unraveling of Earth’s life-supporting ice, ocean, and land systems.
, “The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them.”Of course, opponents of a particular policy, whether it’s health care reform, public transit projects, funding education, or providing emergency relief, frequently point to its upfront cost. “GOP Senators Balk at $1.
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