Report: Federal climate change inaction carries hefty price tag

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s reluctance to confront climate change threatens to create a massive burden on taxpayers, as a lack of planning by federal agencies leaves the government ill-equipped to deal with the fallout from rising temperatures, according to independent congressional investigators.

The report released Tuesday from the Government Accountability Office presents a bleak picture in which the economic costs of climate change spiral ever further upward in the coming decades. While the report finds that coordination among federal agencies in confronting climate change has long been inadequate, it now comes at a time when the White House is making an unprecedented retreat on environmental protection.

President Donald Trump’s scrapping of an Obama-era requirement that federal agencies work together to prepare for warming, the report concludes, has left them with no concrete plan of action or indication if there will be one.

Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) had requested the GAO examination of climate change preparedness. Collins is among the renegade Republicans vocal in their disappointment of the administration’s climate policy. She voted against the confirmation of EPA chief Scott Pruitt and reprimanded the administration for bailing on the Paris agreement to combat climate change.

The extreme weather events of the past decade that scientists believe were exacerbated by climate change added more than $350 billion in costs to taxpayers, according to the report, a huge drain on the budget as funds were diverted to cover more disaster relief, crop and flood insurance, firefighting costs, and infrastructure and public lands repairs. Those demands threaten to increase by $12 billion to $35 billion each year by the middle of the century, it said. By the end of the century they could go up each year by as much as $28 billion in today’s dollars, a crushing cost for taxpayers.

The Trump administration was invited to present its own view in the report, but opted not to do so. The administration has generally addressed questions about global warming by casting doubt on established climate science. As devastating hurricanes were bearing down on Texas and Florida over the summer, Pruitt dismissed discussion of the role climate change is playing in such storms as opportunistic and inappropriate.