Global warming will depress economic growth in Trump country

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/may/07/global-warming-will-depress-economic-growth-in-trump-country

Dana Nuccitelli
Mon 7 May 2018 06.00 EDT

A working paper recently published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond concludes that global warming could significantly slow economic growth in the US.

Specifically, rising summertime temperatures in the hottest states will curb economic growth. And the states with the hottest summertime temperatures are all located in the South: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. All of these states voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

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While the Federal Reserve paper focused on the US economy, developing countries will be made much worse off by climate change. Many third world countries are located closer to the equator, where temperatures are already hotter than the temperature sweet spot identified in the 2015 Nature study. A new paper published last week in Science Advances also found that these poorer tropical countries will experience bigger temperature swings in a hotter world. Because of this combination of hot temperatures with bigger swings in countries with fewer resources available to adapt, these poorer nations are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts.

This is a key moral and ethical dilemma posed by global warming: as an important 2011 study concluded, the countries that have contributed the least to the problem are the most vulnerable to its consequences. Meanwhile, wealthy countries are already lagging behind their promised financial aid to help poor countries deal with climate change.

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Rejecting climate policies like a carbon tax will ensure that the world misses the Paris targets, resulting in slower economic growth. This will particularly hurt poorer countries and Trump’s base in the South. The Federal Reserve Bank paper notes that these states are already among the least developed in the US, based on the Human Development Index. This means that they already have the weakest economies in the US, and failing to take steps to slow global warming will just hamper their economic growth further yet.

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