Climate Change Business

A project co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Thomas Steyer has produced a report called Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.  It seems to geared toward some people that need to hear the message the most--business leaders and Republicans who tend to downplay any negative impact.

This ties in nicely with a report commissioned by the Citizens Climate Lobby called The Economic, Climate, Fiscal, Power, and Demographic Impact of a National Fee-and-Dividend Carbon Tax. The benefits include large carbon dioxide emissions reductions, employment gains, greater real per capita income, and fewer premature deaths.

The World Bank also has a report called Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change that shows how transportation and energy efficiency policies could boost the world economy by $2.6 trillion per year.

Maybe we need to be inundated every day with reports about the benefits of taking action along with the risks of inaction.

Update (July 6):  Fred Pearce describes a study by lead author David McCollum of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis that shows investment in low-carbon energy needs to be boosted by $1 trillion per year to have a 70 percent chance of avoiding 2 degrees Celsius of warming.  But energy investment is already $1 trillion per year with half of that in the form of fossil fuel subsidies.

Update (July 26):  Maybe mockery is all we have left.

In a worrying development that could have dire implications for the health of the planet, a report published Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that the number of climate change skeptics could reach catastrophic levels by the year 2020.