Dec 22, 2024
Entering the Era of Climate Consequences, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Talks to Scientists
"I like to say that science provides civilization, its headlights to spot dangers ahead. My wife is a marine scientist, and I have great respect for what scientists do.
I actually describe the climate crisis, or at least our response to it, as having three phases.
The first was the science phase, during which our science headlights gave clear and accurate warnings. Science did its job despite decades of industry-funded fake skepticism and faux alternative science. You did your job.
The second phase was the political phase. We failed you abysmally. The lure of fossil fuel money and influence corrupted our politics. There is no kinder way to say it.
So now, we enter phase three, the time of consequences. This is where people pay the price for the decades of corruption we allowed. Ultimately, we will pay the price in flooded shorelines, damaged ecosystems, blighted agriculture, and ravaged oceans.
But in the short run, the unprecedented risks of floods & storms, and wildfires are undermining the insurance and mortgage industries. You can't insure what you can't predict. And you can't mortgage a property you can't insure. So, the leading edge of our climate crisis, as it impacts humans, will be in economic consequences- particularly, consequences for homeowners, more immediately for those in coastal zones and wildfire-adjacent areas.
In the Senate budget committee which I chair, we have spent the last two years exploring the myriad ways in which climate change will disrupt the economy, not just disrupting insurance, mortgage, and property markets but also by raising consumer prices, snarling supply chains, upsetting municipal bond markets, and creating what are called "Minsky Moments" where asset values suddenly collapse for fossil intensive assets also sometimes referred to as the carbon bubble in economic treatises.
All of these forewarned phenomena show present evidence of being underway. Current research suggests that several ominous tipping points loom around 1.5 degrees C of warming: the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the death of tropical coral reefs, and an abrupt permafrost thaw. Getting that research right is vital, as each would cascade into catastrophic consequences worldwide.
We are entering a period of American dis-enlightenment, and I hope it is a brief one. Understand that this dis-enlightenment is not happening. It is being done. Enormous resources and an apparatus of fraudulent information have blocked real climate progress, taunted your work, and funded the incoming administration, which in a transactional fashion will serve the wants and the greed of its fossil fuel funders rather than the safety of our common home.
“Know that the Enterprise of science is weak against this new disinformation predator. When your precise scientific language meets Madison Avenue's honed catchphrases, you lose. When your patient peer review meets rush-to-market propaganda, you lose. When an evidence-based method that suffers correction meets an industry that amps up its output of Lies, when they are proven false, again, you lose. But they seek to discredit science whenever science warnings conflict with industry profits. Think about that. Work with the scientists who study that science disinformation campaign in the battle between truth and propaganda.
The topography of the battlefield is shifting. And it is shifting because we have moved into this era of consequences. These consequences are going to hit Americans in the pocketbook, at the kitchen table, in their grocery prices, and potentially in economic collapses prompted by climate uncertainties.
Many of us know how paltry the economic metric is against the looming loss. But people who don't care about polar bears or green jobs will feel very different when the consequences in this new time are felt; consequences begin to hit home. So watch that insurance to mortgage to property values cascade, which the chief Economist of Freddy Mack warned would hit the economy harder than the 2008 mortgage meltdown.
Pound away at your work on the effects of climate change on global GDP, on predicted annual losses of $38 trillion, and on a reduction in global GDP of 19%. Set the stage for when those property insurance bills hit people's kitchen tables. The April Economist magazine, not a green publication, warned that climate change would shake the foundations of the world's largest asset class, real estate, a $25 trillion value. Connect the dots; the Florida property insurance Market is already in a state of meltdown."
Author: Dushyant C. Kothari