A new study from Stanford finds that failure to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord will cost the U.S. economy several trillion dollars in the coming decades — and cost the world economy tens of trillions of dollars.
The study, “Large potential reduction in economic damages under UN mitigation targets,” was published in the journal Nature last week. It is among the first to analyze the economic benefits of keeping global warming to the levels unanimously agreed to by more than 190 nations at the 2015 Paris climate summit.
President Trump has made the U.S. a rogue nation — the only one in the world to abandon the agreement — under the misguided notion that it will hurt our economy. The reverse is true.
“In fact, we calculate the cumulative savings to the U.S. economy alone of meeting the most ambitious Paris targets could total $6 trillion (in today’s dollars),” the researchers Marshall Burke and Noah Diffenbaugh explained in The Hill on Sunday.
Studies have made clear that this huge economic loss from inaction is vastly larger than the cost of reducing carbon pollution.
Indeed, the Stanford study finds that inaction could cause a stunning 30 percent loss in future global economic output — whereas the world’s scientists and governments have concluded that even the most aggressive climate action costs under 0.1 percent of GDP...
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-climate ... 120a5870a/