Tag Archives: climate-impact

Who stands to lose the most from climate change? Red states.

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A new analysis from the Brookings Institution shows that many of the states and counties with the most to lose from climate change have been voting for candidates least likely to do something about it.

Of the 16 states facing the highest long-term losses of income from climate change — starting with Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana — all but one voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That exception: Hawaii.

The data, sourced from Climate Impact Lab, tell a similar story when you look at counties and congressional districts. On average, the districts that voted Republican in November stand to lose 4.4 percent of their income this century, compared with a loss of 2.7 percent for those that backed Democrats. Those red districts tend to be less affluent, more rural, and more exposed to rising seas, stronger storms and punishing droughts, particularly in Florida and Texas.

Typically blue regions like the Pacific Northwest and New England could actually stand to gain from climate change, the report says. For chillier states, warmer temperatures could mean lower energy bills and a boost in crop yields. But a lot of other bad stuff too, don’t forget.

So, does this mean that red states are doomed, and liberal northerners will be left saying I told ya so? Well, it might not get to that if this new data — combined with the actual observable effects of climate change — changes people’s minds. Recent polls suggest that voters are coming around on the issue, as hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires get harder to ignore.

The Brookings Institution, for its part, offers this advice to climate activists: “A harder charging, grittier, and more palpable campaign focused on climate impacts in ‘red’ America could prove a lot more effective. And the data now exist to make that happen.”

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Who stands to lose the most from climate change? Red states.

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New Study: Waterworld Is Definitely Going to Happen

Mother Jones

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Here’s a bit of depressingly apocalyptic news to kick off your weekend: A new study has found that if humans burn all of the known reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, virtually all the ice on the planet will melt, inundating the land with up to 200 feet of sea level rise.

The good news is we’ll all be long dead by the time this happens. Even at our current rate of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, the kind of catastrophic ice loss the study describes won’t take place for several thousand years. The exact timing is the hardest part for scientists to nail down; the ultimate outcome, however, is quite certain. One of the study’s authors, climatologist Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, described it as similar to leaving an ice cube on a table in a hot room: You can be confident it will melt, even if you don’t know exactly when.

Scientists have been carefully scrutinizing ice in Antarctica for a while now, since so much of the world’s water—and thus, potential sea level rise—is locked up there. The most studied section is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which appears to already be in an irreversible decline and could ultimately produce 10 feet of sea level rise. But Levermann said the study today, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, is the first to look holistically at ice across the whole of Antarctica. The scientists projected loss of ice in a series of increasingly dire scenarios, based on the total amount of CO2 humans release after today. Ten thousand gigatons of CO2 is roughly what you’d get from burning all the known fossil fuel reserves. Our current rate is about 36 gigatons per year, and rising, so depleting the remainder could take a few hundred years. After that, it would take several thousand more years for the full effect of the warming to take hold.

The chart below shows the eventual ice loss after 10,000 years given different quantities of emissions:

Winkelmann et al, Science 2015

What’s even scarier isn’t shown in the chart: Antarctica, Levermann said, “will be the last bastion, the last ice on the planet.” In other words, if we reach scenario F, all the rest of the world’s ice will already by gone. At that stage, you can kiss most of the coastal cities goodbye (if they’re still there, anyway—remember, we’re talking about thousands of years in the future).

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about climate change in the more immediate future: more extreme weather, droughts, crop failures, and the like. Sea level rise (albeit on a much smaller scale than what is described here) is already taking a toll on coastal communities around the world. But this is a disturbing preview of the long-term disruption caused by our actions. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on Earth then:

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New Study: Waterworld Is Definitely Going to Happen

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Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

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Fossil fuel companies stand to miss out on $9 trillion to $12 trillion in profits by the end of the century if carbon emissions are taxed at a high enough level to meet international climate goals. Cry us a river, right?

That’s because demand for coal, oil, and natural gas would fall as prices are pushed higher, leading companies to leave vast volumes in the ground, according to a new study.

On the flip side, how much revenue would be generated through taxes or the sale of carbon allowances? The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found the fossil fuels that are mined and burned would generate carbon-tax or carbon-auction revenues of $21 trillion to $32 trillion during the same period. That means a net economic benefit of as much as $20 trillion.

“Implementing ambitious climate targets would certainly scale down fossil fuel consumption, so with reduced demand their prices would drop,” said Nico Bauer, lead author of the study and a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The resulting profit loss would be overcompensated by revenues from auctioning emissions permits or taxing CO2.”

After crunching numbers with an energy-economy-climate model, Bauer said the researchers were surprised that “revenues from emissions pricing were found to be at least twice as high [as] the profit losses we estimate for the owners of fossil fuels.”

Although revenues from carbon pricing would exceed lost fossil fuel profits globally, the same would not be true in all countries. From the paper:

[R]egions with high energy demand like China would generate huge carbon rents that are much larger than the loss of fossil fuel rent. For other regions including the Middle East and North Africa showing the largest loss of fossil fuel rent the carbon rent is still sufficient to compensate. However, for a country like Russia the compensation is not feasible based on the domestically generated carbon rent.

The report authors point out that governments who levy carbon fees and taxes will get to decide how to spend the revenues. They could be funneled into green-energy projects and climate adaptation efforts, for example, or simply used to reduce income taxes.

“We know that fossil fuel owners will lose out on profits, but the big question is who will benefit from the new revenues generated by climate policy?” said coauthor Elmar Kriegler, also of the Potsdam Institute. “It will fall to policy makers and society at large to decide this.”


Source
Emissions pricing revenues could overcompensate profit losses of fossil fuel owners, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Global fossil energy markets and climate change mitigation – an analysis with REMIND, Climatic Change

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

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